Averting his eyes, Hunter tried to avoid seeing the doctor approach with the needle that would enter his neck. “I thought vaccines were supposed to be given in the arm,” he said as he winced in preparation for the shot.

“Normally, yes,” said Dr. Kahn. “But we haven’t been able to find a suitable vein in your arms, so we must try somewhere a bit more accessible.”

“And this is supposed to protect me from what, again?”

“This is a special cocktail,” Kahn explained, “of elements from the range of virulent samples we currently have at this facility. If any one or a combination of them were to be released, you should be protected if you came into contact with them.”

The needle seared into his skin, just as he feared at would. Hunter sucked in his breath and pushed his neck further to the left as he waited for the pressure from the syringe being plunged in to subside.

“Sign this,” said the doctor, thrusting a clipboard into Hunter’s lap brusquely. “It’s the completion form; give it to your direct supervisor to put in your file.”

The clipboard also held a sterile bandage. Oh, Hunter reasoned, I suppose I have to put this on myself. He exited the doctor’s office and tore the wrapper off the bandage, hastily pasting it to his neck.

A door opened and Dr. Kahn called after him. “Mr. Reeves! I forgot to advise you of possible side effects.”

Hunter turned where he stood and looked at the doctor.

“Pain and redness at the injection site for up to ten days,” said Kahn. 

There was a pregnant pause.

“That’s it?” Hunter prompted.

Dr. Kahn waited a moment more. “Yes.”

He slammed the door shut.

Hunter woke from his dream, startled by the sound of a slam.

“Damn it!” He heard Kai shout from the kitchen area.

Rubbing his eyes, Hunter staggered from his bedroom and looked into the kitchen. Kai stood forlornly, holding a cookie tray holding six blackened, smoldering stones of what appeared to have once been biscuits. When he saw Hunter approach, he set the tray down sheepishly.

“I was gonna try to surprise you with breakfast in bed,” he said sullenly.

“I see that,” Hunter said, amused. He looked across the countertops to see opened packages of flour, a jug of milk, a carton of eggs, all de-shelled, and an empty pack of bacon. Following a hunch, he opened the garbage can to find puck after puck of blackened eggs and gray-and-black streaks of meat littering the can. “I appreciate the effort. Or the many efforts, in this case.” He snickered.

“It’s not funny!” Kai cried, wadding up the plastic that had held the raw bacon and tossing it in the opened bin.

“I think it is,” Hunter said, still grinning.

Kai picked up a halved eggshell and lobbed it at Hunter. It bounced right off his forehead and split into more pieces as it hit the floor. “Okay, maybe it is,” he said tauntingly.

“Brat,” Hunter laughed, picking up the pieces and trashing them. Wiping his hands on his shirt he stepped close to Kai and tilted his head, planting a soft yet lingering kiss on his lips.

“So… last night wasn’t weird? For you?” Kai asked nervously.

“I would have told you if it had been,” Hunter offered. Kai nodded.

“A month and a half,” Kai countered. “It wasn’t rushing, but it wasn’t an awful lot of time, either.”

Hunter opened the fridge and passed Kai a bottle of blood, which he put in the microwave. Hunter saw Kai had bought him a few individual bottles of orange juice. He picked one up and opened it.

“It felt right,” Hunter said. “Every moment of it. From the kiss to… everything else.”

Kai nodded and waited for the microwave to finish before asking his next question. “Do you… would you want to move your things into my room… at this point?”

Hunter looked thoughtfully into his bottle before taking a swig. “What do I need to know? About how you sleep?”

“Well, you know by now I can do it at any point, day or night, as long as the room is light-tight.” As he said this, Kai clicked a button on his smartphone app. The shutters to the living room began to open, displaying a dazzling view of the Dallas skyline. The sun had just set, leaving a breathtaking purple sky, with a few distant flashes of lightning from an approaching thunderstorm dotting through the clouds.

“I do prefer the room to be pretty cold when I rest,” he continued. “Around 55 to 60 degrees.”

Hunter whistled. “I can’t begin to imagine your power bills in the summer,” he said.

“Solar panels on the roof, m’dear,” Kai grinned, pointing upward. “Usually in July and August I get refund checks from the power authority. Anyway,” he said, alternating between sipping his bottle of blood and cleaning the counters, “I have plenty of blankets that you can use if you want. Other than that, sleeping with me will be fairly standard.”

“What about the cat?”

“Annabelle?” Kai said, the name triggering the animal’s senses. The calico trotted into the kitchen and nuzzled against Kai’s right leg; in a figure-eight motion, she walked around his legs, then did the same to Hunter. “She’s taken to you quite nicely. I don’t think she’ll mind you sharing her half of the bed."

“Her half. Sure.” Hunter smirked.

Kai wiped the remaining flour from the countertop and tossed the rag in the sink. Hunter finished his bottle of juice, tossed it in the recycling bin next to the trash and embraced Kai. “Say it again,” he whispered. “Just like you said it last night.”

“Hunter,” Kai said, nuzzling against his cheek. “I’m falling for you. I’m helpless to fight it. I well and truly believe I am in love with you.”

“I love you too,” Hunter replied.

Hunter waited to relay the details of his dream until they both went into the office that evening.

“Dr. Lawrence Kahn,” Hunter said, having finally recalled the man’s first name.

Kai typed the name into his computer. “There’s no record of that name.”

“I didn’t just dream it up,” Hunter said, “despite my remembering it through a dream.”

“I don’t doubt you, Hun,” Kai replied. “I’m just saying, it isn’t in any of the files we’ve recovered from Alex’s computer and it’s not in any of the publicly accessible files, either.”

There was a knock at Kai’s door. Agent Hayes, a tall and elegant looking woman of about 30 and flowing blond hair entered, carrying with her a load of magazines. “These are the medical journals we cross-referenced with mentions of InnerCore,” she said, setting them on the coffee table in front of Hunter. “I warn you now - they’re boring as all hell. Good luck!” She winked at them both before leaving.

Hunter took two magazines, put them in his lap, and turned the cover of both.

“You’re not reading both at once, are you?” Kai peered over the edge of his desk.

“Not reading, exactly,” Hunter said. “But I’m scanning the table of contents to see if I can find a direct mention or something InnerCore-related. If I can’t, then I’ll try actually reading these things.” He tossed the first two aside and moved along to the next two.

“Meanwhile, there have been four more people to go missing off that list,” Kai said. “Including a man who’d moved to Hawaii a week before he disappeared.”

“Where’s Alex?” Hunter replaced another pair of magazines.

“We’ve put him in a safe house,” Kai said. “He think’s we’re CIA, and we’re just going to let him think that.”

“Has he said anything else that could be of use? Maybe I could talk to him or” —

Kai shook his head. “Between the paranoia he already had and the business that went down at the club, he was already on shaky ground.”

Hunter looked confused. 

“He’s not mentally stable right now, Hunter,” said Kai. “If we’re not careful, he could break completely.”

“Oh.” 

There was an awkward silence that lasted several minutes, except for the occasional sound of Hunter discarding magazines and replacing them with others. Kai resumed work on his computer. After about ten minutes passed without the sound of papers changing positions from the sofa, Kai looked over at Hunter. He was staring at a single magazine.

“What is it?”

“It’s this article about a technology being tested at InnerCore. Or it was. The FDA shut down this research project.”

“Go on.”

“‘Indirect radiosynthesis,’” Hunter read, “was to be a  radical form of cancer therapy by which, its researchers claimed, oncologists could inject into the body a barrage of laboratory-grown, healthy tissue cells programmed to instantly and rapidly replicate when introduced to a specific radio wavelength.

“The program’s developers theorized they could essentially drive the healthy cells into the cancerous ones, destroying them, and replacing them with the self-replicating healthy tissue. The radio waves would then be shut off after a predetermined length of time, stopping the assisted growth of the healthy cells, and allowing them to grow at the body’s normal rate.”

“That sounds like a world-changing medical breakthrough,” Kai said. “I hasten to ask, what caused the feds to cancel the project?”

Hunter shuddered. “According to this, in some tests on sample tumors, the radio waves had little control over the cells once they were turned on,” he said. “In many cases they simply turned into tumors that grew ten times faster than the original cancer.”

“Indirect radiosynthesis,” Kai muttered. “What made it indirect?”

Hunter flipped a page. “Here’s a diagram,” he said, bringing the magazine over to Kai’s desk. “It looks like a modified sonogram unit.”

“Those things used to see the baby during pregnancy.”

“Yeah. They hold the wand over the area of the body where the tumor is,” Hunter indicated with his finger over the diagram. “And they use an ultrasonic wave to send the cells on their way to the tumor.”

“So I guess my question is,” Kai said, “if that was the indirect method… what would turn the process into a direct radiosynthesis… or a DRS?”

“That’s gotta be what DRS stands for in that spreadsheet,” Hunter concurred. “Well, if indirect meant holding the radio device over the body, I suppose the direct method would be having the radio… in the body.” A chill ran down Hunter’s spine. “Hun, am I able to access the medical records you all had me take when I joined up?”

“Within reason - why?”

“I need to see my X-rays.”

Moments later, Kai and Hunter were in the medical records office. Dr. Ife Mwodim slid her eyeglasses up her forehead as she leaned through the filing cabinet. Her English brogue was thick and charming. “You’d think only being here a short while, I could find your films quickly,” she said. She looked up to smile gently at Hunter.

“Take your time,” said Kai. He put a hand on Hunter’s shoulder. “What are you thinking? What’s that instinct telling you?”

“What if the research didn’t stop at InnerCore?” Hunter posed. “What if it just continued, under the table? What if they moved on to another stage of the project?”

“Highly unethical, for starters,” Kai said. “Plus, you’re suggesting them putting an actual radio transmitter in the body. For the purposes you’re suggesting it’d have to be microscopic. Molecular, even.”

Dr. Ife made a noise - a cheer of success, then came up to the light box with a large manila folder. She tugged the X-ray films out of their sleeve. “Left side or right?” 

Hunter recalled the moment in his dream again. “I was craning my neck to the left, so I guess the shot went into the right side of my neck.”

The doctor slid the appropriate film under the clip of the light box and switched it on. All three of them strained to examine the bluish-white glow of bones on the film.

“I’m not seeing anything,” Hunter said after a moment.

“Wait - I think I do,” Kai said. “But… I don’t know for sure. It could just be dust or a small nick in the X-ray plate.”

“I have a digital copy on the mainframe,” Dr. Ife suggested. “I’ll pull it up on the monitor and zoom in.”

“How powerful is the zoom feature?”

“Approximately 250 times,” came the reply.

Hunter and Kai watched the large TV screen above Dr. Ife’s desk as she called up the image and began the zoom.

“Shit,” said Hunter.

“Oh, man,” groaned Kai.

As the zoom reached its maximum setting, what Kai had hoped was a speck turned out to be exactly what they feared. There, embedded in Hunter’s neck muscle, was a microscopic computer chip, complete with a transistor and at least three diodes, and a speaker the shape of an everyday shirt button.

“They put a friggin’ radio in me,” Hunter said.

“They put them in several hundred people,” Kai said. “Including Alex.”

Hunter gulped with dread. They had already learned those who were first reported missing had been ‘engaged’ in the DRS project.

And he and Alex had recently been ‘selected’ to join them.