"Are you sure about this?"

Doug gripped tight to Cube's harness, peering out through the vent he'd stashed himself away in. He didn't respond for a moment, in part due to focusing on the ground below, but also because he really wasn't.

"You heard what happened."

He had. The cryo-bed had jostled him awake, providing a courtesy call for an evacuation because of a reactor core meltdown. And it had been His fault. However, they were both pretty much out of options. Doug was surprised he'd been woken up at all; his long sleep was well overdo, and he'd crawled into the bed with that truth in mind. "I have to."

Cube shifted against his back as he leaned away from the vent. "Another wrong you need to fix?" They ventured.

"If I can." Doug leaned back on his heels, ducking away as the camera in the next room whirred. "Besides, she's going to get bored of AI testing eventually. And who knows where she'll source what she needs."

"…I don't like our odds." Cube grumbled.

If the ability hadn't been beaten out of him, he would have laughed. "I don't either." Doug wasn't even sure if this would even work, though that was a given with a lot of his plans. Never sure, never hoping. It made one sloppy, to hope too much. But this one, he was less and less sure about.

It had been about a year and a half if his counting was right. Probably longer. There were no day and night cycles, no calendar, barely any working clocks, and his circadian rhythm never worked right to begin with. Probably much, much longer. Doug had been doing his best to combat the growing despair with each passing hiding spot, but it had gotten to the point where even Cube could no longer bring him down from his bad days. The resolve to not let Her be the end of him faltered, crumbling away like revising rubber after each dead end and blocked escape route.

She'd put Her back in charge. Cube was furious about it, gave him an earful about having to be the hero, but Doug refused to believe it. A reason, there had to be a reason, but what calculations she'd done to arrive at that solution, he'd never know. Maybe to stop the reactor core? She could have escaped long before then, he was sure of it. Or maybe, maybe she couldn't bear to leave her friend hooked up to that thing. Doug hadn't put too much thought into it. He couldn't. What ifs and whys were only a distraction. So, he went back to his routine. Run, hide, plan, draw, like the last ball of Newton's Cradle on a lone string left to spin in a perpetual circle and never get free. The days blurred into one another, sometimes his body felt entirely too distant and his thoughts far too disjointed. The world was a nebula of colors, shapes, sensations and words, and so so loud. Half the time Doug wasn't sure where he was in the lab or what he was doing. But nothing changed. Nothing ever changed.

Until it did.

The ID core had been recalled. He couldn't be sure when. One day he'd suddenly heard them. Or more accurately, just him. Screaming. She couldn't be too far away, though, so it had to be both of them. Doug didn't stop to check; in fact, he'd sped up to get as far away from it as possible.

But he'd come back. Just like with the girl, he couldn't just leave him there.

"AAAUUUUURRGHHHHH!"

Electricity danced over the sides of the metal sphere as it shook, optic bulging forward and handles flapping in an unsuccessful attempt to shake it off. The ID core had been clamped into the same stick for days now, being shocked until he shut down and then powered on again. Doug just needed to wait for an in-between period. He would start babbling incessantly if he picked him up awake.

"He's going to need help." Cube dug into his shoulder blade as the screaming continued beyond the vent. "And lots. It's already enough of a struggle to work with the two of us. A third will get us caught, especially if it's him."

"Then I guess I'll have to risk it."

"This time, it really will be the end of us."

Doug watched the arcs ripple and contract, and the blue light of the optic dim into grey. The handles went limp. One shot. This could upend all his efforts, but really, he wasn't entirely sure why he was even making those efforts in the first place. She hadn't said anything in a while, but Doug knew she was watching. Always watching everything, even if she never spoke. He'd need to be quick.

First, the harness slipped down his shoulders. She could kill Cube the picosecond She saw it, so it was best to leave them out of view of the cameras. The vent flew off with a single kick, and Doug counted the seconds as he lunged out, snaking his fingers around the handle and pulling. Lightning chased after the dormant sphere before retracting back into the plug. Static clung to his fingertips as he dragged the combined weight of himself, Cube and the ID core back through the length of the vent. As he tumbled down the pathway to his hiding spot, Her voice chased after him.

"Oh, there you are." Cold, calm, collected as ever, even as his heart threatened to break what had to be some very fragile ribs by now. "I was wondering where you'd scurried off to. For a moment, I was actually worried you'd died. That would have reflected poorly in your file, 'dying before testing'."

Doug scrambled back; tongue bitten down as he hoisted himself over a ridge. Cube thumped him. "He'd better be worth this." And he couldn't help but share the sentiment.

"You know, you really live up to your namesake." She chided as he looped his arm under the handle so he could use both hands to lower himself down. "Running, hiding, living in the walls, like a rat. But rats are more open to helping science."

Just another turn up ahead and-

"Oh, that reminds me. You have a prescription waiting for you in the mail room. How generous of them to bring it here," Doug, forgetting if they even had a mail room, tripped over his feet slightly at the thought, "I've heard that without treatment, the symptoms get worse. You haven't scribbled all over the walls yet, have you? Or developed any irrational attachments? Perhaps you should go pick it up, I'm sure you'll feel much better."

His heart skipped a beat, and he bumped unsteadily into the metal paneling. How did she… Doug knew his graffiti wasn't that subtle, but how'd she know about-

"She's bluffing." They whispered. And she had to be, had to be or Cube would have fizzled. Unless that was the plan. She always loved games like that. Doug reached back and curled his fingers tight around the corner above his shoulder. If he held on tight enough, they wouldn't go anywhere. A small piece of him yearned for the comfort of the medication, of the steadiness it brought. But the scar on his thigh reminded him why silence wasn't an option now.

The panels under his feet began to shift, and his heart sank. He started moving again.

"What do you even want with that little moron, anyway? He's contagious. Although I'm not so sure how he'd affect someone with your… condition. Maybe he'd catch what you have. He's already broken enough as it is."

Doug did his best to ignore Her. The pounding weight of Cube digging recesses into his back and the swing of the ID core were enough to keep him grounded. He could make out the marks along the walls, the looping swirls he'd aimlessly doodled to guide himself back to safety.

"Speaking of being broken, do you remember that little thought experiment I told you about? With the cats and the boxes and the deadly neurotoxin? I think you'll be happy to know that I've updated my hypothesis-"

The rest of the words spiraled into nothing as something else took form. A thought, tracing down into the roots of his memories and landing on a phrase. "Down below". As Doug had rooted through the files during that exact conversation, he'd skimmed through a drawer with that phrase marked in the placement category on every subject, each accompanied with a shiny photograph of a face he'd rather forget.

And for a moment, everything fell into place. The space around him was less of a cancer and more a tree, growing, pulsing out of itself and gathering rings by the season, each iteration hidden under something bigger, something worse as the roots spread, further further further-

Down below.

There were more cryo-beds. That's where they'd kept them.

The atoms of a plan bound together, and Doug kicked off the wall away from his hiding spot, all the while rattling and blocking out the voice that chased him through his nightmares. Under his palms, the core's optic flickered, blue light hitting the metal. Don't wake up, he pleaded, don't wake up or we're dead.