Tuesday, 8:23 pm. Charlie.

Skoodge and I crept our way down the hall, keeping to the yellowed sickly-lit walls, me slightly ahead – enough to feel like a leader.

"Do you know your way around this place at all?" I spoke in a whisper. Skoodge didn't have any trouble hearing me, staying so close that I could feel his quivering antenna brush against my back. I jerked forward at the contact, and he rolled his eyes.

"Sorry. I'm just listening for any guards," He said in a slightly louder whisper.

"Well, do you?"

"Shhh! Listening for guards!"

I bit back a growl, leaving him in silence to listen. After what felt like a year feeling along the wall, I noticed an archway up ahead on our left, leaking light into the hall and illuminating Skoodge's tense face. We moved faster now, until we stood under the arch, cold white light spilling over us. I blinked, Skoodge covered his eyes with a black-gloved hand.

"Oh," I murmured when my eyes focused ahead, "It might be a little harder than I thought to find the ship."

Ahead, we could both see into the next room. It was a huge round room, with a spiral staircase running up the middle of it, and a walkway looming in front of us to the staircase on this floor. Looking up, we could see the staircase like a huge pillar, soaring into the white expanse of the ceiling. If there was a ceiling. I couldn't see that high. It could have been blue sky above us for all I knew. But the light beating down on us wasn't sunshine. It was the harsh, cold fluorescent of a doctor's office, or a too-clean bathroom. There was no warmth or golden radiance in it. It was a light that caused Skoodge's green face to look pale and sick. But maybe that was just him.

"Hey." Turning to him, I nudged him out of his stupor. "If you know how to get around this place..."

He shook his head, both to clear it and to disagree. "I don't. I was just as much a prisoner as you. I never saw anything outside of my cell when they knocked me out and brought me here."

I darted to the edge of the walkway, looking down. I didn't see anyone down below on the staircase or surrounding walkways. We would just have to hope that nobody could see us from above. Skoodge ran after me, and thankfully was as silent as I was – him walking in his black boots and me barefoot.

"How did you get here? Why?" I lowered my voice as much as I could. He and I crouched at the lip of the walkway, just before the part that extended out above the empty air towards the stairs.

"Well... after I conquered Blorch and got kicked out of Zim's basement, I had to find somewhere to work and somewhere to live... The Tallest wouldn't give me another ship or base, and I had to stay off their radar... So... I did some freelancing as a Ghost Professional for Mysterious Mysteries."

"That paranormal TV show? You got a gig," My eyes ran up and down his obviously-alien-self and narrowed, "... At Mysterious Mysteries?"

"That's right. I figured the best place to hide was in plain sight. But then, I guess my brilliant human disguise didn't fool someone, because before long, when I was heading out of the studio one night, some guy jumped in front of me and sprayed me with something, then I just... woke up here."

"How long have you been here?"

"I don't know. It felt like a long time, but time passes slowly when you're in a blank white cell."

"What have they been doing with you all that time?"

"Not much. Aside from the daily meals, the only people I saw were doctors, or scientists, or some kind of medical person. They came in every once in a while, asked a bunch of questions, put this metal device on my arm, took some notes, and left."

"I didn't even get the doctors' visits. But I've only been here for a couple days. Maybe a day?" Maybe a week. I really had no idea. Skoodge was right about the disorientation with time in this place.

"You're lucky. It wasn't terrible, but..." Skoodge looked at the white tile floor. "It's no fun being a prisoner."

"I hear that. Let's get out of here." I gave the Irken a pat on the shoulder, having to reach down to his height. His red eyes glistened with wetness at my touch. "... Ooookay. Let's go."

I stood fully and started out across the walkway toward the staircase, looking out over the rail-less edge for any guards or scientists below. Hearing the light pad of Skoodge's feet behind me, I paused above the top step. "Keep an eye out behind us."

"Yes sir – I mean, ma'am!"

I rolled my eyes.

I put my foot down on the top step, expecting to begin to walk down as normal. This is not what happened. The stairs began to move beneath me like a bullet escalator. My teeth crunched down on my tongue as I slid to my butt on the next step. The stairs immediately jerked to a halt with me.

Ooookay, moving stairs, good to know.

I stood again, tongue throbbing, arms outstretched like a tightrope-walker. As I began to step down, it moved again. This time I was prepared for it and walked down smoothly. I heard Skoodge clamber down behind me, probably with more grace. But then again, probably not.

Even trying to keep silent, our light footsteps and the hum of the escalator echoed around the circular room, sounding to me as loud as a battle-mech's gait. I began to step down the moving stairs to get myself down faster. As we speed-walked, I looked out at the walkways and hallways we were passing. None of them had any signage or markers to tell us where they might be storing a huge spaceship. As the spiral escalator wound its way around the huge pillar in the middle of the room, the dark hallways began to blur together. I looked down over the edge of the staircase. It seemed like I could see the bottom, but with all the whiteness of the room, it could have been an optical illusion.

Suddenly, a couple floors below us, a door before the hallway slid open with a mechanical screech. It was one of the few floors that had a door instead of just an open hallway. And someone was coming through it.

I silently cursed to myself and turned to shove Skoodge off into the next walkway we passed. The stairs stopped again, just in time for two figures to walk out into the light a single floor below us. They were temporarily blinded by the brightness, and I was able to push my painfully slow companion all the way into the darkness of the hallway without them noticing us. The tinny voices of the two below bounced up to us as we crouched in the shadows just inside the arch of the doorway.

"... although a Size 12 scalpel might be too angled for the muscle tissue, perhaps just for the initial cut. After I get through the tissue, I can use a circular saw to bore a hole into–"

"Do you ever stop rambling, Moth?"

It was two different, young-sounding guys. The second voice was harsher and held a superior air. The first sounded like...

"I'm just thinking aloud. And it's Agent Mothman."

Agent Mothman. My stomach ballooned up into my throat.

Dib.

Skoodge seemed to recognize the young man too, his eyes wide and head swaying. He looked more scared than me. I made a mental note to tell the alien about how I had ended up in this place, and who was responsible.

Dib continued rambling as the pair headed to the staircase, boots clicking stoically, "Anyway, don't yell at me. It's not my fault."

"We brought her in because you called it in. And now she's escaped. Sounds like your fault to me. I'm going to have so much work to catch up on when the security system restarts."

"What work? You were just sent to help me and show me around!"

"Shut up."

I could see the second guy now, red hair flaming above his head as he led the way onto the escalator. Dib followed behind obediently, and the two began ascending with a soft whir of the escalator. When they passed the floor we were on, I ducked into the shadows and pressed my arm against Skoodge's red-uniformed chest, pinning him against the wall as tightly as he could fit. Apparently we were unseen in the shadows, because the pair continued up past us, and on into the distance. Their voices echoed a few floors up, but it was too far away to hear their conversation. Leaning out of the doorway, I watched until they either got off on a floor, or I just couldn't see them anymore.

"They're looking for you." Skoodge's hissing voice beside me made me jump.

"Y-yeah." It was only a matter of time before they realized I was missing from my cell. But I wondered how they knew. After the 7:00 dinner is brought, usually nobody else shows up until the next morning. And it hadn't been more than... what? An hour or two since then? Maybe there were cameras in my cell after all.

I didn't pause to speculate. Springing to stand, I raced down the walkway and entered the escalator to go up, before realizing that my alien companion was not by my side. "What are you doing? We have to go see where Dib and that guy went."

Skoodge had stayed in the shadows of the doorframe. "We should see where they came from, not where they WENT."

"What? Why?"

He walked towards me and pointed a finger down to the floor below, at the door where Dib and the other scientist had emerged from. "Didn't you hear what they were talking about? It sounded like they had been interrupted in the middle of something. An experiment? A dissection?"

Everything clicked in my mind at once. I was surprised Skoodge had figured it out before me. Scalpels, tissue, saws... Dib had sounded really excited about something. There was no other creature that Dib was more excited to dissect more than...

Zim.

Without thinking of the blaring reasons we should just leave Zim and get out of here, I gave a nod. Skoodge and I made our way down to the level that Dib and his friend had come from. We reached the floor and stopped in front of the door when another issue came to mind: how to get in. The door was locked with an eye-scanner panel, so my lasagna-print (which miraculously was still glued to my finger) wouldn't work.

Wait a minute.

The door was cracked open at the bottom. A tiny bit of red light sliced through.

Huh?

I dropped to my knees and slid all ten fingers into the seam below the door. With a hefty tug up, the door moved and slid all the way up into the doorframe. Brilliant! But why was this door open when it had a high-tech eye scanner supposedly locking it? Something the red-haired guy had said reverberated back to me. Something about "work to do when the security system restarts". Maybe the security was down? The realization of how lucky I had been up until this point hit me. If even one wrong move was made, if one door wasn't able to be unlocked... I wouldn't be here planning an Alcatraz escape with the little buggy alien.

I peered into the gloom. The room ahead of me was like an airplane hangar. Contrasting red and greenish light floated through the huge hall, giving the room an expansive and eerie feel. It was too dark to see the ceiling, but by the sound of our steps, it seemed at least twenty or thirty feet above. The green source of light wasn't coming from the ceiling like the main white room with the staircase, but rather from these weird, spherical shapes against the wall. They ballooned out into the room, like large, ugly boils on the metal walls. The protrusions were only a few feet high (maybe a little taller than me), maybe a yard wide, and stuck out nearly a foot or so. They lined the walls, like glass globes of liquid green light. Red bulbs were spaced between the spheres, burning crimson into the room without really making things brighter. I moved deeper into the red-tinged shadows, Skoodge close behind once again. His eyes adjusted faster than mine, and he gave my shirt sleeve a frantic series of tugs, making a whining noise. I turned to him and mouthed, "What?"

He only had to point again. We were near one of the spheres against the wall now. Looking closer, I could see that it was like a round fish tank at the aquarium, bulging out into the room so you could have a greater degree of view. Inside it, backlit by a green glow, was a dark, protuberant shape. It could have been human, had it not sported what looked like a third arm jutting from the side of its head.

Oh.

So this is where they keep their... "specimens". Zim has to be here somewhere. But the three-armed golem was not him.

"Just ignore it." I whispered, but did not take my own advice. As we passed it silently, we anchored both our eyes on the creature behind the glass. If it were to have moved as we walked by, it probably would have been funny to see the two of us scream and wet ourselves. Thankfully, it stayed completely still. I wondered if it was alive, being so still.

Each tank we passed had some kind of figure inside. Some looked almost exactly like humans, others looked more like a science experiment gone wrong. Well duh... that's exaclty what they are. Skoodge and I peered into each one we passed, looking for a square head with antenna on top.

Skoodge grabbed by sleeve again, and whispered, "It's a Vortian!"

A what? My expression obviously conveyed by confusion, because Skoodge continued, "An alien race that is allied with us Irkens. Well, more like enslaved by us."

I looked into the tank nearest him. The shape inside was short, like an Irken, and had glimmering white horns on its forehead that I could see even in the murky fluid.

"Do you recognize any of the others?" I began moving again, having to give Skoodge a nudge forward as well. As we moved deeper, the alien's green skin was flashing slowly, oddly. A light in the distance of the room was pulsing red into our faces. Our whispered voices echoed through the huge room eerily loud.

"A few. But most Vortians are in prisons or workshops, helping to build things for the Empire. The rest are too smart to get captured by some dumb humans." At a glare from me, he shrugged and continued, "I just mean, these people have to have some serious intellegence to acquire all these... specimens. Who are they?"

"The Swollen Eyeball network, that's who. Or at least, they're working with them. That's who came to my house and kidnapped me when Dib reported us."

My bare toe struck an odd surface, and I bit down on a cry. A round metal grate the size of a dinner plate was sunk into the tile floor. The grate was damp and felt greasy on my bare sole. Is the drain there for the fluid inside the tanks? This made me imagine a massive shadowy fist beating through a glass tank wall, crashing, green liquid sloshing everywhere.

"Dib reported you? For what?"

"Uh, having an alien at my house, I think. I guess they didn't want to let the secret out that aliens are real. People would go crazy."

Skoodge shook his head, slowing his pace. "That doesn't make any sense. From what I know, if anything, the Swollen Eyeballs want to expose aliens, not hide them in here."

"I don't know, then." I waved at him to keep up with my quick stride. "Maybe they want to keep the profits for themselves when they do expose Zim and all the aliens they're keeping here. There's lots of things I don't understand about these people. Like, why keep me prisoner? Why not just kill me or–"

"Look!"

His voice was sudden, and way too loud. I stopped dead, looking at Skoodge in surprise, and then looking forward. While I had been looking to my right and left, eyes searching for any movement inside the tanks, the room had come to an end in front of us. I could see where the red pulse was originating: a spinning, flashing, police-type siren light was fixed above a pair of metal doors. If there was something important in this section of the lab, it would be in there.

We moved forward. I stuck out both hands and pushed on one of the double doors. Surprisingly, it budged, swinging inward. The next room was a little brighter, and a slimy light shifted out onto the floor at my feet. I looked ahead in awe as Skoodge and I moved into the square room.

It was him.

Zim hung suspended in a round, clear tank. Green light filtered down around his head, past the dark, pulsing tubes that were fixed to his pale skin. His pink and black uniform hung loosely around him in the liquid environment. Unlike many of the other creatures in dark tanks, Zim's antennae twitched – and gave me a rush of relief – when the door shut with a bang behind us. Skoodge and I jumped at the noise, and glared at each other to blame for not catching it. Not that the noise probably mattered. There were no scientists or guards nearby, it seemed. We hadn't seen a single person since we entered the specimen room. Maybe everyone had left to search for me, like Dib and the other agent.

A button panel circled completely around the round tank, filled with unlabeled buttons of gray and flashing red. One of those had to get him out of there. We just had to figure out which one. The important thing was...

"We found him," I breathed.