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            For the longest time you didn’t think anything could get scarier than the inside of your own skull, trapped all alone with your own existential doubts and the billboard-sized visage of your sister, perhaps lost to the world forever, stomping around and jamming you into the canyon-sized crevice between her jammy toes.

            This metallic box of a compound you’ve been trapped in for the better part of six groggy hours is making a case for a new top position, though.

            Of course, nothing about its damp olive walls and tinny floors that clank under every footfall is actually frightening to you. You’d easily agree to spend a week in here rather than an hour with your imaginary giant sibling clomping your self-worth into mulch.

            But with Sophie here too, the one person who’s watched over you and your fragile psyche more than anyone else in the past painful eighteen months, you feel a new kind of dread rising. The prospect that you’ve dragged her into trouble too, from which there may well be no return, is eating at you more than Carly ever threatened to.

            “Just drop a piss in here, honey bunches,” the towering redhead demands in a soft tone that nonetheless rebounds off the narrow walls of what you’d guess to be a testing and medical chamber, though its meager resources suggest it would be more appropriately used as a bunker latrine. Her menacing fingers approach again, pinched around one last tiny glass vial for you to empty the last remaining bodily fluid they haven’t yet extracted.

            Sophie is seated in the corner, rooted to a chair, her dirty golden locks glued to her forehead by terrified sweat. Tears still stream passively down her flushed cheeks after earlier when the strange woman took a sample of your blood with that incredibly thin needle that nonetheless prompted a shocked yelp from you when it pierced your skin.

            No ropes are necessary to bind Carly’s doppelganger there in the corner on her metal seat, as your black-suited captor in her steel-toed combat boots and victorious smirk has made it perfectly clear she can mash you into a fine paste in half the time it would take Sophie to leap up and make a rescue dash toward you. Your cousin, bless her heart, seems dead-set on keeping you in one piece, and so remains there, shooting you glances as comforting as she can muster, though her fingers are trembling hard as they hover over her neck.

            You’d be lying to yourself if you said you didn’t believe someone out there like this had their eye on you ever since you and your sister’s shattering of known biochemical laws. Frankly, part of you is surprised it took so long to happen. But you’re not at all surprised to realize all your anxiety is over Sophie’s safety rather than your own.

            Truth be known, you’ve been just a tad dead inside already ever since you came home from Carly’s sacred dorm room, your old life leveled and literally stuck up your cousin’s butt.

            “Ahem. A piss. Come on, I’m sure you’ve been itching to take one ever since we nabbed you up,” the woman repeats, snapping her massive gloved fingers so close to your tiny head that it nearly perforates your eardrums. Just for good measure, she prods you in the gut with her index finger, nearly knocking you over, but clearly with enough gentleness to avoid damaging you just yet.

            “Leave him alone!” Sophie shrieks at the woman’s intrusion against your abdomen, gripping the edges of her chair but restraining herself from leaping forward across the silver cell of a room. A fresh well of tears bursts and trickles down the crook of her neck.

            “Feisty, that one, isn’t she?” the woman chuckles to you, stroking her finger down your back. “It must be nice to have the kind of family loyalty you have, huh? I probably wouldn’t have believed it if I hadn’t seen it up close, but I can’t say I’ve ever seen it so strong. And across the board, really.”

            Your heart folds into itself inside your chest. What does she mean “up close”?

            “And as such, I’d hate to have to make an example of one of you,” she continues, her free hand hovering at her utility belt and any number of diabolical methods of convincing.

            “It’s okay, Soph,” you call out, your throat cracking slightly. “She didn’t hurt me. And she won’t hurt you, either.” It sounds like a lie even to you, but at this point, there’s no sense in squandering what meager hope remains.

            You turn your back on your cousin, tugging your pants partially down, and urinate into the translucent opening as it’s offered before you by the ginger giant’s stock-still digits. A sigh of relief escapes as soon as your bladder is clear and the woman is drawing your stolen pee away with a grin. Every muscle in your body has been anxiously contracted since you were grabbed inside your aunt and uncle’s house, so taking care of vital bodily functions wasn’t really in the cards until it was necessitated by Sophie being threatened.

            “Good boy,” the redhead says once the final sample is sealed tight and loaded into a metal tray. Her thumb alights at the top of your head, petting you like a miniature puppy and earning another flinch from Sophie. The stranger seems to savor your cousin’s reaction, patting at your scalp several more times in quick succession, not even hitting hard enough to inflict pain, but plenty to inspire worry in Sophie again. Perhaps to remind her what’s at stake. It makes sense, in some terrible way.

            “Please. L-Let me have him b-back. Please?” your cousin sobs, cupping her hands around her tear-stained cheeks and rocking back and forth in her chair.

            “Mmm, I would, but you see, I’m a woman of my word, and all I really promised you is that I won’t hurt him so long as you cooperate. The same goes for him.”

            “He did what you wanted,” Sophie protests quietly, twiddling nervously at her matted golden locks. She’s fighting back hiccups after the aggressive tearfall.

            “Yes he did, and for that I’m very grateful. The two of you have become part of a scientific breakthrough the likes of which the world has never seen,” the woman declares, no ounce of irony present in her velvet voice. “But like I said. I’m a woman of my word. And I promised my word to one other. Which, in this case, means I promised him to one other.”

            “What?” Sophie cries, trembling on the edge. “NO!” The woman snaps her fingers twice again, thankfully further from your ears, and a balding man in full-body kevlar passes through the door, yanking Sophie by the arm up from her seat with nary a twitch and dragging her back into the hallway by her grease-stained shirt. She thrashes every inch, but clearly is no match. Your cousin claws desperately at the doorway, sound lost from her voice as the tears splash down to the ground far below.

            Your mouth hangs open, too petrified to summon a word or a croak of comfort for your hysterical cousin.

            “Now come on, hon,” the woman says sweetly once Sophie’s been taken away. “You’ve got an appointment.” Her fingers sidle in around your hips, pinching you closer into her leathered palm and sweeping you off the tabletop. You hardly realize it as you’re bundled into her soft fist, nor conscious of your surroundings as she whisks you out the door and down past several iron-barricaded entryways, before stopping in front of one last door at the end of the tube.

            “What are you doing with Sophie?” you manage to say.

            “Putting her away for safekeeping. I don’t intend to get rid of her unless one of you makes it necessary,” she answers, drawing her hand up closer to her face as her opposite appendage fiddles with the lock below. Strangely, as her relaxed breaths waft down over you, they land cool, even against the material of the glove as the air collects around you. A shiver ticks along your bones.

            “Tell me something, little Jack,” the woman says. The sound of the lock clicking away echoes off the walls. “Your concern for your cousin is very sweet, but you don’t seem afraid for yourself. Why not?”

            “Why should I?”

            “You strike me as smart enough to know when you’re beat,” she says, twisting the handle of the door and curling her fingers in closer around you, blocking your view of the new room.

            “Yes.”

            “It’s just a question,” she chuckles. Her boots seem to hang in the air just a little bit longer than before as she marches into the room, punctuated on each step by the clang of her treaded soles. “To tell you the truth, I’ve just been curious how a mind doesn’t break after all you went through. I thought it might be useful to know someday. Depending on what happens here today.”

            “Why’s that?”

            “Oh, no reason,” she sighs, flashing you an obvious wink. “I suppose it’s been an exciting few hours for you. Maybe you’ll feel more talkative later on, especially if I’ve got dear, dear Sophie poised on some kind of conveyor belt moving slowly toward a rotor.”

            You wince, but make no more attempt to respond as the woman comes to a stop at the far corner of the cramped room, warm lights from above flooding the leather cracks in her gloves as they coil closer around you.

            “Just a little humor, hon,” she says, her hand already descending after one final cold exhalation around your shivering shoulders. “I’ll be back for you later once we crunch the last set of numbers, and then we’ll all find out if this really is one giant leap for mankind.”

            Mired in puzzlement and mounting panic for Sophie’s safety, you remain clutched into yourself like a mewling rodent even as the woman’s jet-black gloves unfold around you, depositing you onto your back in the basin of what you now realize is some sort of walled-in glass containment unit. You don’t even bother trying to rise, instead resolving to focus your pupils directly on the featureless ceiling so far above.

            Not bad. Much more spacious than Carly ever gave you to live in, anyway.

            “Play nice,” the stranger booms a final time from on high, tucking a red lock up over her ear and turning on her heels with a militaristic efficiency. “Whatever that may mean for you.”

            The last snap of the locking mechanism falls into place behind her, granting you the briefest heartbeat of silence and solace in this twisted world of yours before any semblance of peace you’ve scraped together comes careening down, washed away into oblivion again.

            When you first see Carly’s face coming into view, it doesn’t register at first as reality.

            How could it? So much of your known universe has bled together in the past year and a half, especially where it regards your sister’s tanned face and gleaming golden hair, her pearly whites flashed triumphantly above your whole being, the oceans of her crystal-blue eyes boring through you and whatever remains of your soul.

            As you’re sprawled on your back and looking up to her statuesque visage where it now stands above you, each leg on either side of your hips, partially bloomed out by the bright white luminescence flooding the glass cage, it takes a full minute of staring to realize this isn’t the goddess-sized Carly you’ve come to see in your vivid memories and most potent daymares alike, but the one who once stood just a matter of inches shorter than you, or rather, has been reduced to a matter of inches total just like you.

            “Heyyyyy…” she croons in a delicate whisper that penetrates your bone marrow with its instantaneous command of your attention. She leans in over you, hands to her knees, the white piece of fabric that roughly translates as clothing cascading gently down her athletic curves. It’s like the clock has been reset. “How’s the homework going, bro?”

            The words land in your brain, immediately coloring in the blank spaces where Carly left off the last time you were in the same room, but you can hardly process them.

            Homework? Has she lost her mind, just as you have?

            “Hey. Just trying to be nice here. How’s your homework going?” she repeats, still in a loving murmur. Carly’s head tilts to the side, shifting the dishwater-cataracts of her tresses over to the opposite shoulder. The azure rivers around her pupils widen.

            Your mouth opens softly, but you dare not try to speak. The words are becoming more familiar, like a distant childhood story. Is it actually possible she’s-

            “Hey. Answer me,” she says a final time, her declarations barely escalating. Bracing herself against her right side, your sister’s left leg ascends lithely from the cold floor below you, her bare foot arching over your hip and up along your chest, casting a gentle shadow on its journey toward your face.

            You understand the dance now.

            You’ve been here before.

            “Carly… I’m… trying to… work. Get your… fat feet… out of my face,” you muster, unsure if you’ll be able to remember the words, but they arrive just as easily at your lips as Carly’s own toes, which by now are pressed in a doughy line along your lower lip.

            You see your sister’s smile quaver and upturn even higher at the recognition that you remember these words just as well as her: to see that for you, too, this was a significant moment in your personal histories, even if neither of you realized it at the time. The first point in this insane chain of events where Carly, even in some small measure, made some part of you hers, and you both came out content with it.

            “Aw c’mon, Jack, I don’t think they’re… fat.  They’re mostly just… big.  Yeah, big.  Are they… bothering you or something?” Carly continues, following the script, though it’s getting hard to keep the joy from showing between every other syllable. Her toes wriggle along the skin below your mouth, alternately pressing each marshmallow digit into your lip.

            Goose bumps shoot up your body both ways at least three times. You feel as if you’re being baptized. It’s like a dream you don’t want to wake up from.

            But it’s not a dream. Not anymore. You can see that. Almost taste it for yourself.

            “Y-Yes,” you lie.

            “Well, I’m sorry.  Here, I’ll… move them,” she says, fighting back a shrill giggle. The ball of her foot, resting against your chin by now while her heel digs possessively against your Adam’s apple, scrunches in nearer to your jaws. Her toes flex, cresting over the hill of your lip and dipping into your mouth. You feel the girth of her big toe easing along your teeth.

            Another few minutes of abject silence pass as Carly’s hands find their rightful places at her shapely hips, her smirk teased dominantly to one side of her dimples as her left foot fishes deeper into your open mouth. The pink ball of her foot rubs incessantly at your lower lip, prompting a forcible kiss. Parting her big and second toes, she finds your tongue quivering against the ribbed roof in wait, and a second later your sister has your muscle clenched between her powerful toes.

            You can tell it’s been a while since she was bathed by your captors. A noticeable buildup of caked sweat, flaky dried skin, congealed oil, and bitter filth meets your taste buds and is immediately washed down toward your throat by your rapidly building saliva. Wrestling to keep the choking down is difficult as the flecks of porous leakage and general waste courtesy of Carly’s body slides down into your esophagus. It’s undoubtedly the most pungent taste you’ve ever experienced on the underside of your sibling’s godly foot.

            “It’s good to see you, little bro,” Carly offers, snapping out of the script at last as she yanks her foot from your aching jaws with one last pinch of your tongue. Dropping to her haunches above you and planting her toned ass into the center of your stomach, she leans in, her hot, sticky breath clinging to your neck as her lips pass over your chin and meet your cheek with a sloppy impact before dragging her tongue up the length of your head. It immediately calms the trembling still rattling your spine as she marks her territory once again, licking the sides of your face with the full width of her rippling tongue.

            “You too,” you utter, unsure of whether you’re telling the truth or not.

 

Chapter End Notes:

Just two chapters left. Expect big things headed this way.

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