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tops
and stools and the hammock in the corner. She closed her eyes in concentration, her nostrils flaring. The
almost-
Gene scent had the pungency of someone related to Gene, older, male.
Gene’s father, perhaps?
    Since turning, her enhanced olfactory senses never ceased to amaze her; but she was about to be marveled all the more. Because this scent—it now ruptured a distant memory. She had
smelled this odor long ago, when she was only a child, when she was a heper, when she wasn’t even conscious of smelling it, much less storing it in her memory. The scent had burrowed into the
irretrievable depths of her brain and only now, with her empowered sense of smell, did she recall it.
    This
almost
-Gene smell was the smell of the doctor.
    The one who had performed that awful surgery on her a decade ago. Her body tensed at the memory.
    She moved away from the workbenches and ambled toward the back of the laboratory. In the farthest corner, the
almost-
Gene odor dropped off and she was about to turn around when she
sniffed something curious. Actually, it wasn’t the smell itself that was unusual—it was the same
almost-
Gene smell—so much as its placement. It was coming from the floor.
She sniffed. No, it was coming from
under
the floor.
    She cocked her head, stared down.
    A second later, she was ramming her arm through the floorboards. Her fingers touched the metal top of a small trunk. She tore out a few more floorboards and lifted the trunk out.
    She ripped open the lid. There were stacks of paper inside. Ancient papers, musty, yellowed, and frayed at the edges, they harkened back to an era not decades but centuries ago.
    It was not the content of these papers that immediately drew her attention—the ancient typeface was utterly indecipherable. Instead, her eyes lit on the insignia of the crescent moon
in the top corner of each sheet:

    There were other papers, as well, modern and crisp with relative newness, covered in the
almost
-Gene scent. She flipped through them, glancing at the handwritten notes. These were
apparent transcriptions of the ancient documents. She read hurriedly at first, thinking there would be little to hold her interest. But soon she was taking in every sentence, swallowing every word.
Blinking at the truth they revealed. A half hour later, she had read enough. To understand. Everything.
    She took out a sheet of paper, a crumpled letter, from her pocket. She’d been carrying it for many nights since finding it in the Pit, and she now placed it next to the handwritten
notes. It was the same handwriting.
    She felt nothing but a deep pity for Gene.
    She gazed through the opened doorway to the outside. The black of night was shading gray now as it had done millions of times before. But it felt as if the world, the universe, had
irretrievably changed.
    Sunrise caught everyone by surprise. Dawn light radiated into the streets, breaching the walls like a flood of acid. Many never woke at all—their inebriated bodies melted without so
much as a twitch and their liquefied flesh dribbled between the stones of the fortress wall and into the dewed grass of the meadows. Others awoke screaming and scrambled into nearby cottages,
seeking a refuge that was to be—like the remainder of their lives—short-lived. Within minutes, the strengthening sunlight slipped into the interior of the cottages through windows,
smashed doors, breaks in the walls. It was a slow, agonizing disintegration for those inside, and some soon preferred the quicker death of full-on sunlight exposure. They ran outside into the
onslaught of sun rays, dashing along streets and racing down meadows, as far and as fast as their disintegrating legs could take them. Those who had not melted away by the time they reached the
ledge of the cliff threw themselves dramatically into the ravine and were seen no more.
    Only Ashley June, ensconced safely in the darkness of the laboratory, survived. When dusk finally arrived, she opened the