Persephone was stuck on the Molded. Thoughts of its human physiology became a permanent fixture in her mind, and being in the laboratory intensified her conviction to learn. So it was a no-brainer to autopsy Molded cadavers and study their inner workings. Plenty of people had become Molded already, giving her half a dozen fresh corpses to work with.

She wasn't sure how many differences they really had from their human counterparts. Aside from being covered in that mold, and their bones becoming spongy and flexible, everything else seemed to be the same. She procured blood samples and observed them over the week, only to find that the DNA remained the same. The only difference was the amount of fungal spores floating around in the petri dishes.

Obviously, the further along, the more mold, but oddly this meant the Molded had far fewer white blood cells. She supposed this made some sense. The mold was quite adept at keeping itself healthy when it remained in range of Eveline. Persephone kept petri dishes up in the main house areas as well as the lab, and found the reduced proximity to Eveline meant the white blood cells were fighting back—often winning against the mold. What this meant for the future of the Molded, she wasn't sure yet.

Despite its regenerative properties, it simply wasn't strong without Eveline. So she experimented with proximity to Eveline and various fungicides, seeing which ones worked best near and far. As she stood in the lab with the microscope against her eye, she was enraptured by her experiment. Some of the fungicide didn't do a thing, but this most recent one actually killed the mold effectively. A pair of hands grabbed her waist and she let out a tiny yelp of surprise. Lucas put his head against the crook of her neck.

"Didn' mean t' scare ya."
"You snuck up on me like a fuckin' creep, Lucas."
"My bad. Just wanted to see how you were holdin' up. Don' think I seen you all day."
"Really?" She read the forgotten clock. "Fuck, it's so late. How did that happen?"
"Time's a bitch, ain't it? What you been workin' on anyway?"
"I've been thinkin'," she said, "about us being Molded, too, and how unstable the mold is away from Eveline. That's kinda scary, ain't it? I mean, if something goes horribly wrong, we'd be pretty fucked, wouldn't we?"
"Yeah, I guess we would be."
"So if we can figure out how to stabilize the mold, harvest it, and kill it off, we'd be able to control it even better than Eveline could. We wouldn't need her anymore, and we wouldn't be totally screwed if we went full Molded."
"Mm," he hummed against her skin. "Sounds like you been thinkin' this through."
"You know me: I take everythin' very serious."
"But it's a good idea. I don' like bein' under Evie's control all th' damn time."
"Exactly. I'm gonna find the key to givin' her the big Fuck You."
He kissed her neck. "Try not t' work yerself t' death. You haven' eaten all damn day. We should at least get some dinner 'fore you continue. Take a—" He grabbed her breasts. "—break."
"You horny bastard."
"S'all yer fault."

It was easier to give into Lucas than it was to argue against him. And while at first she thought he'd simply bend her over and taint their lab with the smell of sex, he wasn't satisfied with feeding her a load. He wanted her to actually eat dinner. Lucky for her, their lab dinners were much more filling and healthy than whatever the fuck went on in Marguerite's kitchen nowadays, so she shoveled it down as though her life depended on it. She was back to cutting up corpses all through the night, enthralled and eager to experiment.

She sliced her own fingers open and got samples from herself to see the various reactions, both near to and far from Eveline. The mold in her body fought back against the white blood cells much more effectively. Lucas gave her a sample of his own blood as well, to much the same results. Eveline kept her and the rest of the family far more stable than regular run-of-the-mill Molded.

That's not to say she didn't have times of rest. When her vision blurred or her hands cramped or the horrible odor of the mold got to her, she would go topside for fresh(er) air. Lucas was the only person available most of the time. Sometimes she had no idea where Zoe was, and god forbid she had to spend any time with the increasingly unstable Jack and Marguerite.

She sat in Lucas's surveillance room as he typed up his daily Eveline report that should've been done yesterday. Persephone gazed into the monitors, specifically the basement where she watched yet another Molded convulse on the floor. Reed wouldn't be happy about that, she figured with a roll of her eyes. If she had to hear Reed bitch one more time, she was going to strangle him.

But then a flickering caught her eye on a different camera. The one facing the front gate captured a woman around her age, crouched and treading carefully.

"Looks like we have another trespassin' idiot," she said to Lucas.
Lucas followed Persephone's pointing finger to the woman. "Oh, good, looks like she'll be an easy Molded. Evie will enjoy that, she been whinin' ever since th' bitch got put away."
"Ugh, don't remind me."

Lucas searched around the cameras to find Jack, then stood to alert him. But seeing that woman reignited a part of Persephone. Her palms itched to feel the cold touch of her scalpels again. She put her hand on Lucas's shoulder.

"I got this one."
"Now this I gotta see."

Before Jack had any chance to know that someone was trespassing, Persephone had already crept up behind the woman and bashed her head with an abandoned spade. She had felt nothing during the attack but her rising anticipation. She and Lucas dragged her into the house.

"What's yer plan?" Lucas questioned as they stuffed her into the elevator shaft.
"I dunno," she replied, staring over the woman whose unconscious body lay sprawled on the ground.

Persephone's mind reeled with images that she could hardly contain. The slicing of the woman's flesh, the exploration of her fragile organs, draining her body of its precious lifeblood to keep her as a cadaver.

Something else snuck into Persephone's mind as the elevator let out into Lucas's lab. What about the woman and her family? Who was Persephone to play God? Her feet stopped working when she and Lucas were inches from the operating room.

"Pers?"

Her mouth wouldn't form words. Her body froze as her brain flip-flopped between two opposing ideals. This seemed to happen fairly often, but just as fast as the dilemma came, it was stamped out by her lust for science and medicine.

"Sorry," she apologized before continuing with Lucas.

Soon, the patient was left alone with Persephone and Oliver's mangled form. Donned in full surgery gear, unfettered by anything but her own imagination, Persephone sliced open her anesthetized patient. The smell, the feeling, the warmth, and the blood put her mind at ease. The itch, scratched. Her scalpel moved in harmony with her dexterous fingers.

Persephone pushed aside pinkish organs and felt the beating of her patient's heart against her palm. Compulsion overtook—she needed to keep going, to keep learning. The pungent smell drove her. Curious, she dripped some mold samples into her patient's abdominal cavity. She flushed in another dose of anesthesia while waiting for the mold to work. To see someone's insides being filled with mold, to see how it had flooded through herself, made her hungry and desperate to be satiated.

Black strands like vines spread through her patient's body, intestines entangling with the mold like sickening strands of hair that grew thicker and thicker. She stared on, observing and scribbling on her clipboard how the mold traversed along her patient's liver and stomach, how it rushed up her rhythmically respiring lungs.

The door opened behind her, but she couldn't look away from the grisly and fascinating scene.

"You been in here fer a couple hours," said Lucas. "Everythin' all right?"
"Yeah."
He tenderly held her waist and rested his chin on her shoulder. "Whatchu doin' in here?"
"Experimentin'. Observation."

He kissed the side of her head, then the side of her neck. She tried to ignore the tingling along her flesh as the mold filled in all the empty spaces of her patient's abdomen and chest. Her patient's ribs shuddered and creaked back into place, repairing the bones and plumping them up into their odd, spongy appearance.

"So that's what it's like," she said.
Lucas grabbed her breasts. "Yer so hot right now."
"Yeah," she breathed

Lucas's ravenous grasp wasn't enough to distract her fixed gaze. Her hands wrote of their own accord, words gliding along her clipboard, mind entangled in her experiment.

For the next few days, she kept this Molded alive artificially, as its body was weak and delicate and constantly coding. Persephone surmised it hadn't gotten a big enough dose of mutamycete to survive. She, after all, had gotten puked on by Eveline whose source was greater in mass and in quality than her patient, which had gotten only a few milligrams of cultivated mutamycete.

But as Persephone quickly discovered, there was no shortage of thrill seekers and amateur detectives looking to document and uncover the mysteries of the Baker ranch. She would watch on the surveillance to see if anyone was snooping around, then give the trespasser a warm Eveline-crazed welcome.

As she lugged yet another body down into her lab, the vaccinated half of her brain had brief flashes of lucidity — this person had a life, a family, people who loved and cared for them, people reliant on them. Yet it was never enough to dissuade her. She shook these feelings off every time the other half of her brain begged and pleaded for her to perform her experiments. As she stained her gloves and gear sanguine, painting the sterile room red, she quieted that overwhelming, moralizing half.

Zoe sat in her trailer, leg bouncing as she pulled the last bit of smoke off her third cigarette in half an hour. She tried to hold down her urges—homicide, torture, all the things the rest of the family relished in that she always fought against. Zoe feared the pleasure and rush that she got whenever she slipped. Memories of harming people haunted her whenever she came back from Eveline's influence.

Had it really been over a year? Zoe thought about Judith, about how happy she hopefully had been, how happy she hopefully would always be. While she never got to see Judith, Zoe was glad that Judith would never have to witness what happened at her home. Unlike someone else's unfortunately nosy girlfriend…

Zoe wondered what Lucas and Persephone were up to. Persephone was driven by curiosity, dwelled far too long on her old life, and wound up ensnared in this place (to think Zoe had once told Judith to be more "adventurous"). Lucas and Persephone were often skulking around, doing God-knows-what, and she rarely saw them. They were so secretive. Then again, perhaps the same could be said of herself and Mia. Unfortunately, Mia was in a near constant state of Eveline overdosing nowadays.

A knock on her trailer door made Zoe jump. A knock? Could only be one person, seeing as most of the rest of the family would've just tried to break her door down, but she played it safe. She retrieved her shotgun and crept up to the door.

"Who is it?"
"It's 'Persepenny'."

Zoe breathed deep and set the shotgun aside. She opened the door to allow Persephone in.

Zoe asked, "What brings you 'round these parts, stranger?"
"I can't talk much," she said quickly. "There are eyes everywhere, so I'll make this brief. I want to help you, Zoe."
"You do?" She cocked her eyebrow. "N' what you got to gain? You n' Lucas been gallivantin' around like this is a goddamn carnival, so what in the hell would you wanna help me for?"
"So you can be free. I love Lucas and I'm more than happy here, but you're miserable, and I wanna help you."

Zoe looked Persephone over. Her smile seemed genuine, but her eyes held a sadness that Zoe couldn't possibly describe. It wasn't the loneliness and helpless that Zoe felt, she would've easily recognized that. There was something else there.

"All right. I got nowhere else to go, so… I'll trust you. For now. But you're on thin ice."
"I'd expect nothing less."
"So you help me get out of here," Zoe started, "And I'll help you…?"
"I don't need anythin' in return."
"Now you're makin' me more suspicious."
"Just help me make sure my plan goes off without a hitch. That's all I need."

Her plan? Now Zoe's suspicion cranked way up, but what choice did she have? None of the other family members were of any use to her; her dad wanted to knock her teeth out more than anything else and her mom hated her. Only Persephone could and would step up to the plate.

"We can't be seen together for a while," said Persephone. "Meet me in the basement only. I'll let you know when."

Then she hurried off as if she hadn't stopped by in the first place.