(REWRITING) The Skylar Experiment : Coveting

Chapter Thirty-Six - Behind The Glass

EMMA

RHEA WALKED US THROUGH a lower level, and I anticipated more training rooms but instead I was confronted to a short row of open doors. I peered inside one, finding a classroom of about ten children. They sat so calmly, so straight and focused, and I wondered whether the lady at the board was one of them.

"At this hour?" I murmured.

She shrugged one shoulder. "We give a few leisure hours in the afternoon for the youngest, so the lessons are split. I'm pretty sure all our labs surpass those of public schools by default. Some of the lab techs double as teachers."

"What do they do in those labs outside of teaching kids?" I eyed her and Miles, letting curiosity get the best of me.

Rhea seemed to give it some consideration. She studied the classroom quietly, then tipped her head toward the elevator. And we trotted across the hushed corridor, taking an upper level this time. We emerged into a hall as busy as the first.

"Medical bay," she said while pointing to a set of closed doors. "Or the clinics, whatever you want to call it. We come here for injuries and check-ups and I can't show anything, but just next door there are the biomedical labs." Her finger veered. "They might not kick us out."

She halted in front of a red scanner at waist-level and pressed her thumb. It beeped green and the door unlocked with a hiss. We entered a narrow space lined with hooks for lab coats, some empty.

"We can take one each if we don't stay for long."

Miles plucked one off and offered it to me, to which I grabbed from his hands before he thought I was accepting anything from him. I heard a tongue click and turned my back. Rhea followed the interaction, perplexed, then looked away.

She buttoned the coat and opened the second door. I stepped inside a large, cool room filled with black rectangular tables and burners, deep sinks and huge jugs filled with liquids. Three people sat on stools in the far corner, bowed over a microscope. One raised their head to see who came in.

I wasn't sure what I expected. Probably a mad scientist's lab with caged animals and tubes of floating embryos.

People were scattered throughout the room, doing dishes or discussing over a monitor. They all noticed Rhea and didn't speak up. Manifestly, she must not be just any mutant, because it didn't seem like others had this broad access, let alone the power to bring whoever they wanted without question. But she was so young, barely into the twenties.

The guy on the dishes wiped his hands. "Can I help you three?"

"Any progress on Heradex?" Rhea smiled at the man, crinkling those unsettling eyes. "I've been hearing whispers in lunch rooms, how it keeps you up in the lab. I'm dying to know."

He spotted us outliers in her wake, his mustache quivering under some sort of hesitation. She noticed that.

"You can just show us what it does, no need for a whole lecture."

A name tag read Paul Weiss. He swallowed and chucked the paper towel in the garbage. "Well... Heradex-I didn't yield any significant results on the mutated subjects and we couldn't clear a large participant base for it since... of course." His gaze bounced to me then back to her. "It's still the treatment of choice for helping a man through mutation, that data was clear early on. But we're still waiting on—"

"Helping a man through mutation?" I must have heard wrong, because... "You mean hunters?"

The scientist waited on Rhea. Meanwhile, others had tuned in at the sound of my voice, and the monitor group was staring.