He went first to a white, locked cabinet that wasn’t labeled. Otto relayed a password to open the cabinet that worked only after trying a few variations of the number code the Other provided. Apparently, the presence knew some things, but not couldn’t fill in the gaps for every detail.

Inside the cabinet were white coats and goggles.

With Otto’s instruction, he adorned the equipment.

“It’s too big,” he gasped, panicking as the sleeves of a lab coat dropped past the tips of his pale fingers.

SHHHHH… Otto urged again, the only thing holding his sanity in place. He gently sent images of Clio rolling up his sleeves until Clio, in reality, copied the gesture until his hands were free. There was nothing he could do to hide his hair, but he took up a hair-tie he sometimes kept on his wrist and tucked the length into the back of the coat.

He was then instructed to take up one of the task watches from the stored collection in the cabinet. The ones that were kept extra for lab technicians. 

The feeling of wrongness intensified, but he wrapped the short strap around his wrist and input the login keys onto the stolen watch that Otto relayed to him.

He left the lab in a hurried dash, wanting to run from the lab and be rid of it forever. He could be in the place where Two-One had been murdered no longer. It was only the presence of Otto, with the soothing elixir he leaked into Clio like crushed and liquified codeine, that urged him to maintain a calm, measured walking pace. 

More gaps in Otto’s plan became apparent when, after leaving the lab, there was little to no direction after that.

“Where do I go?” Clio whispered, swallowing back fear. He had yet to see another person, yet there was only a matter of time before he was spotted and noticed for who he was.

Find! Find! was Otto’s only instruction.

Without a destination in mind, he began walking. Using the stolen task watch to weave through the corridors, he was just in the process of scanning into another entry point when the red lights of the alarm began flashing overhead, sounding a piercing, humming drone.

For a heart-stopping moment, he feared that his absence and actions had been discovered. But then he heard a voice from the intercom, making an announcement to everyone on PCA grounds, issued calmly, though urgently: “All agents are to be armed and ready to assist in defending a potential insurrection. There’s been a CODE-01 breach upon main headquarters, building one, three, and eight, by what is believed to be the resistant group known as ‘Hydra.’ All intruders upon PCA grounds are to be shot on site. Thank you.”

Though the intercom shut off, the alarm called on.

There was a bustling of movement as Clio noticed a group of armed, human PCA agents run in formation down the hall before him, shouting instructions as they moved.

Clio ducked behind a wall just in time to avoid being spotted, though it had been close.

While waiting for the agents to pass, he let himself revel in this new information. There was a resistant group? They were here. How? How were they strong enough to get past the PCA security? Nothing was stronger than the PCA…

Clio blinked, trying to rid his mind of the images and knowledge that the PCA had fed to him that was embedded so deeply into every fold of his knowing, and failing. He didn’t know how to think without the PCA. Once you learn a thing, he decided, it is very hard to unlearn it.

Thankfully, now, he just had to follow, and not think about all of the things he now wanted to unlearn. 

Don’t think, Otto had said, and he clung to this instruction.

With the agents having passed, Clio took a breath and closed his damp eyes, reaching out to the bond that he shared with Otto, strengthening it. Solidifying it, until it became a near-tangible force he could seek out.

He followed the bond down various halls he had never been through before, despite being so close to the PCA children residential wing. 

Eventually, he came to the front of a door labeled ‘restricted access.’ 

Clio swallowed, trying not to let doubt drown him, and swiped the task watch across the lock screen, which then prompted him differently than the other lock screens had.

This area is restricted, it said. Please type the name of your supervisor to continue.

Fingers shaking, Clio typed Dr. Connors name.

A green light appeared, and he was able to push through the door. 

As he stepped inside, there was darkness beyond, lit only by fluorescent floor lights that activated when he stepped across them.

He fingered the wall for a light switch, but to no avail.

Through the dim light, he could make out another short, narrow hall, with glass on either side. Doors marked the sides of the hall, and through the glass on each, he could make out the small, six by six feet rooms that were padded from floor to ceiling, much like the dreaded box room was.

“Clio?” a recognizable voice called to him from further down the hall. 

Clio stepped further down the hall.

And came across someone he did not expect to see. It was Three. He was being held within the rooms, obviously unable to leave. It was then that Clio realized these rooms were holding cells, meant to cage their occupants.

Clio immediately swelled with concern. Why was Three being held here?

“Clio!” Three shouted. “But you’re…You’re over there…?” Three was frowning at him, looking back and forth between him and a cell behind him.

Clio turned, though he already knew who would be in the cell behind him. The bond he shared with him was able to determine that much.

And as his body rotated, he came face to face with a mirror version of himself. 

Clio knew that it was Otto, of course, on the spot. There could be no other explanation for this person before him. Except Otto was everything that Clio was, and more. And different.

Clio had been denying that, despite Otto’s persistence, their appearance was the same; that they could appear so alike. Finally being able to look at his ‘voice,’ and personify the intruding presence, he was now able to slam the door upon that denial until he accepted the reality: with uncanny resemblance, there was another person that looked exactly like Clio.

But with differences.

Standing before him, eyes boring back into Clio’s, Otto looked disheveled, unkempt. His white hair, glowing at the tips from the light beneath them, dropped in matted locks to his knees. His heart-shaped face, so similar to Clio’s own, glistened slightly with the sheen of unwashed oil and sweat, grime dusted along his eyes, as though he’d been kept from the luxury of a wash for a long time. He wore a white shift gown stained with brown, bloody splotches of unknown origin, and nothing else.

But that was not where Clio’s gaze settled, and it immediately shifted upward, locking on the space above Otto’s head in shock.

Otto had horns. Two short, tawny arches, the color of stripped bone, stretched out of his head, almost like independent appendages, and short enough to be a goat kid’s. His scalp was bloodied, as though the area his horns had been cut into at some point, but still they resiliently persisted to remain a permanent fixture.

Otto’s eyes were dark on him, somewhat unreadable, though the reverence in them was recognizable, most likely similar to the gaze that Clio held. Otto was the first to break from it.

Wordlessly, and with pleading instruction, he pointed to the key screen that locked him within his cell.

Without thinking or questioning his next action, Clio stepped forward and swiped the stolen task watch.

The door slid open.

In a moment, Clio wouldn’t be alone anymore.

Clio waited for it to happen: a type of recognition between them that he was determined to let fall into place. An embrace of the familiarity that the bond sometimes leaked to him. Finally someone who looked like him, who probably was the same species as him, he was finally…

But when the door slid open, the only feeling that greeted him was a feeling of intense, distilled wrongness. It was like the ground had cracked beneath him, and the cause of it was this person, everything hateful and resentful aiming back to this being.

Otto’s very aura seemed to be spill into the air a feeling of such vile horror, evoking nothing but destruction in Clio, that, like a beaver to the call of a dam, he knew needed to be ended. 

He sensed something that needed to be eliminated, something that threatened him. Something he needed to kill.

By the look on Otto’s face, surprise flickering to spite, he knew that Otto sensed it, too.

They were hissing at each other, horrendously primordially, but Otto acted first.

With a cutting swipe, he jabbed at Clio harshly, causing Clio to stumble back to the floor.

By the time Clio had gotten his bearings, standing again and peering around to the potential threat, the threat he needed to eliminate, Otto was gone.

He’d run away.

Clio, despite the instinctual wrongness, reached out to the bond he shared with Otto, to reconnect it.

It was gone.

The sirens continued to blare overhead.

What did he do now?

The hateful sensation of intense wrongness began to dissipate with the distance between himself and vacated Otto, leaving only a vague emptiness in its wake.

What did he do now?

He was alone once more.

“Clio?”

Clio snapped his head over to look over to the one who had spoken.

Three was still in his cell, watching Clio with alarm.

Swallowing the lump in his throat, Clio walked over to Three’s cell and unlocked it, as well. 

While Clio’s darkness had recoiled in disdain upon encountering Otto face-to-face, when Clio opened the door to this cell, it was the opposite. His darkness, upon encountering Three, perked up in interest.

Clio had nearly forgotten how hungry he was, how starved he was for unknown nourishment, but as Three rushed forward to embrace Clio, he was reminded of it all at once. 

The hug was one of relief of being free on Three’s part, but it proved to be far too much for Clio to handle, as he rushed to clamp down the stir within him that surged forward with the close proximity between him and Three. The strong firmness of the older boy pressed against him, the warmth, the smell.

Clio purred.

“Wow, Clio, you smell so good,” Three murmured, pressing closer. “I mean, you always smell good. But…I think the PCA did something to me. I had to eat these pills before I came here. You smell really good.”

He pressed closer to Clio, and as he did so, Clio could not help but to notice a peculiar hardness between Three’s legs that began to shift upwards the firmer they pressed together.

And as Clio let himself melt into the embrace, he also let himself melt into the background, allowing the darkness to surge forward, as he saw no point anymore for keeping it at bay. For a moment, he didn’t want to be good anymore. Perhaps he’d never really known how.

Three’s smell burning his nostrils, his groin heated, stirring the familiar pleasure, and he pulled away momentarily, only to look up to meet Three’s eyes. 

“Do it,” he urged softly, his voice a vis-energized Command. He didn’t know what it was, but he willed it to happen anyways. 

Three seemed to understand the command, however, and bowed to kiss Clio.