Steve’s reality settled heavier on him as those first weeks passed. He retreated further and further into himself, communication monosyllabic and rare. The last real sentence he’d uttered had been in the moments before they’d prepped Dee for the genetic experimentation the project boasted.
His world darkened, the edges frayed and bleak. There was nothing to say. The time for words had long passed. All that was left were the thick fingers of guilt and despair and fear and loathing clenched in his core.
The insert of the cold steel of that first needle into Dee’s arm, the point-of-no-return for all of them, the moment when the first drop of serum entered her system, sucked his last ray of hope to shadow. Until then, in the days she lay unconscious, when they waited for the serum’s calculat
