Adam and Lena break into the Smile Institute after dark, chasing a bet and a rumour. Inside, the mint-scented lab turns stranger by the minute, until something in the cold room answers back.
The campus was almost unnaturally still when Adam and Lena slipped up to the fence of the Smile Institute. The place looked wrong at night, all clean lines and sealed windows, as if it had been built to keep secrets in rather than people out.
Nobody at school believed the stories about the lab. Adam liked that. He liked anything with a locked door and a rumour attached to it. Lena liked it less, which was probably why she was already regretting the bet that had dragged her out past eleven. One selfie by the weird toothpaste machine, Adam had said. In and out. Easy.
Getting over the fence took seconds. The front entrance took a little longer, but not enough to matter. Adam worked the lock with a bent tool he’d bought at an antique market and heard the soft click that meant they were in. The air inside was cold and sharp with mint, and the worktops gleamed under rows of dead-silent lamps. Rows of polished instruments caught and threw back their light, making the corridor look deeper than it should have been.
On a table in the first room sat a thick report stamped in red: DNA of Caries Bacteria - Experimental Report. Lena stopped beside it, frowning. “That’s not normal,” she whispered.
Adam opened the cover, but before he could read a line, a shape moved behind the glass of the cold room door. He went still. Lena saw it too. At the same moment, the overhead lights dimmed to a dim, sickly blue, and a voice crackled from somewhere in the ceiling.
"Please leave the research area immediately. The purification procedure will now begin."
Lena’s phone died in her hand. The screen went black.
A slow, scraping sound came from the cold room, as if something was dragging itself closer to the door from the other side. Then the blue emergency lights came on, one by one, and in their flashing glare Adam saw the shadow clearly at last. It didn’t look like a person. It looked like something built to wear a human shape, and now it was standing right behind the glass.