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Rachel had found a lab. Her lab, according to the smart plaque on the door. Immaculate, gleaming surfaces, tall, sturdy computer banks and an incongruous mess of papers that Rachel was now walking over to inspect. Official reports and lab results, proposals for experiments involving the time vortex, matter transmission, human brain implants…
Rachel took a deep breath, horrified. This was all her doing? The worst of humanity, government stamped and approved. She needed to get out and find Allison, then destroy the technology that brought them here. Some things were better left unknown.
Shoes clicking on the floor. A figure in the doorway. Allison. She looked at Rachel with relief. Her hair was done in a ponytail, unusually, and her dark duffel coat was buttoned right up. She was missing her scarf.
“Rachel, I’ve found you!” She smiled sweetly. “We have to go, I’ve found another exit, it’s this way,” she said, gesturing down the corridor to the right, the way Rachel had come.
Rachel shivered, “The experiments they’re doing here…oh Allison, it’s awful.”
She drew closer to her friend, only now noticing the shiny dark spatters on her collar. “Is that blood? Are you hurt?
“It’s nothing. Just a little accident. It’s not even my blood,” Allison brushed her off.
The corridors were mostly bare, with the odd propaganda poster or sign indicating a new state of the art telescope or computer.
They had been walking for several minutes when Rachel stopped dead, “This isn’t the way out...”
“Don’t you trust me?” Allison tried, but Rachel just scoffed.
Allison sighed. “I didn’t expected you to work it out so fast, but I shouldn’t have underestimated you. You are the Professor after all, I suppose.”
Confusion, then understanding. “Where’s Allison? My Allison? What have you done with her?” Rachel eyes blazed with anger, trying to mask her creeping sense of fear for her friend. Goodness knows the kind of horrors she might have been subjected to here.
Other Allison smiled again, sweet as honey, “You’ll never know.”
She reached into her coat—did she take it from Rachel's Allison?—and pulled out a chunky pistol. Rachel backed away, but Other Allison gripped the gun easily by the barrel and swung it, the solid grip connecting hard with Rachel’s temple. She moaned and fell to the floor, unconscious.
“I'm going to enjoy interrogating you.” She whispered, eyes gleaming wickedly.