Work Text:
School had let out early, because the heatwave was requiring more hands working on the fields, so Cub had snuck away from his post, where he was supposed to watch dry waterways for nonexistent water, and run to the testing facility where they worked with the sicknesses of the crops.
District 9 was boring, just fields and fields and more fields. But the testing labs attracted little Cub like a magnet. Something about all those fancy glass containers, the microscopes and the jars full of weird things made it incredibly fascinating. And the concept of a spreading illness, it just blew his mind how a tiny speck of mold could grow to cover entire fields in the span of days.
He’d been sneaking into the facility since he was little, going through a weak spot in the fence, having memorised the code to access the door, and the times at which folks would come in or leave. The few times he had been caught, he’d pretended to be the kid of some lab worker, and those times he had been given guided tours of the place in an attempt to locate his fictitious parent.
His obsession with the lab had begun when he was a seven year old, and the school had taken them on a tour, to show off the non-farming work that was done in the district. It turned out studying the illnesses and working on insecticides were the only two things.
Today he’d made his way to what he called the “experiment rooms”, where all sorts of unknown, weird molds and substances were being studied, since sometimes they could turn a harmful thing into a very useful one in the labs.
The labs were half empty, so he could roam undisturbed, but the few folks he saw around seemed frantic and rushed, and that made it so they were too distracted to spot Cub going deeper into the facility than he ever had.
He found himself in a room with a hermetically sealed room, where someone had erroneously left the door slightly ajar.
As he poked around, fascinated by the black and blue fluorescent molds growing in the neatly organised jars, he didn’t notice that someone had come in.
“Cub. What are you doing here kid? This is not the time to explore.”
Cub startled and looked up, quickly putting on his best lost puppy face and deciding to ignore that the lab worker somehow knew his name.
“Uh- I’m really sorry ma’am, I got lost, looking for my dad. He works here.”
“Kid, it’s not a good time. We all know you sneak in here to explore, and that your parents do not work here. We let you do it, it’s kind of adorable, and you might as well let you learn as much as possible, since with all likelihood you’ll be working here in a few years. But not today, today you need to get out. Now.”
The tall woman gestured for him to follow, and he did, putting on the right amount of shame necessary for being caught red handed, but secretly he was overjoyed that they thought he could work there one day.
As they rushed through the corridors, Cub struggled to keep up with the woman, who was over two heads taller than him, when a blaring alarm started going off, and the lab woman murmured a curse under her breath. A colleague of hers ran into them and whispered in her ear something Cub could barely make out:
“5Ku-1k breached, get him out of here, and if I were in your condition, I’d leave too.”
The woman who had been escorting him went pale, put a hand to her stomach, grabbed Cub and basically ran the few meters left for the exit, then continued dragging him, until they were far from the lab.
“Go home, do not tell anyone what you saw today, and do not come back to the labs unless invited. Have I made myself clear?”
Cub nodded frantically and ran off, still trying to process what happened. With the million worries and questions going around in their heads, neither Cub nor the lab woman noticed the small specs of blue coming off of his shoes as he ran.