Later that night, the generator coughed.  

The disruption woke her with a start.

She sat up, looking around the dark bedroom. In the corner the kerosene heater glowed steadily.  Fully awake in an instant, she listened with keen attention to the heavy, rhythmic thrum that had become the heartbeat of the cabin.

Cough. 

She swung her legs off the bed and stood, immediately in motion.  Pushing her hair back from her face, her fingertips bushed the protrusions.  They’d grown while she’d slept.

She moved swiftly to the main room; to the main breaker panel. The green “System Ready” light was gone. A bright, blinking yellow warning light winked back at her.

She pulled on her boots, grabbed her flashlight, and bolted out onto the porch. She wore only her flannel sleepshirt, but she didn’t notice the bitter, arctic air. She lunged over the hoarfrost-topped snowdrifts to the massive cylinder gas tank near the tree line.

She knocked the crust of ice away from the metal dome lid, flipped it open, and shone the beam inside.

The mechanical needle on the float gauge should have read 30%. It was shivering violently in the red, resting just below 8%. Functionally empty.

Stella stared at the needle while the biting wind whipped around her bare legs.  She tapped the gauge, trying to coax a different reading.  What? was the only question her sluggish thoughts could dredge up.  She’d immediately checked the gauge upon her arrival at the cabin six days earlier.  The needle bobbed confidently at 60%.  Now, at 8%, in the brutal arctic cold, the liquid propane couldn’t vaporize properly to fuel the generator. The tank was starving itself.

She staggered back inside the cabin,went to the dining table, and dug though stacks of notepads, looking for her initial calculations.  Her math had been flawless, she knew.  She’d confirmed it with the laptop.  60% volume meant three hundred gallons. She calculated a fixed consumption rate based on what her equipment would use. She factored in Boyle’s law, which said something about… under temperatures and continuous load… propane does… something.  She flipped a page and saw a formula.

She looked at the squiggles, struggling to understand. The numbers wouldn’t line up in her head; they felt heavy, slippery, moving with a frustrating fluidity.  But she remembered what it had added up to.  Twelve days.  The generator could run, providing electricity to her equipment, for lights, for charging the battery backups, for twelve days.

Plenty of time.

Except now it wasn’t.

As she stared at the math, her gaze drifted past the logbook to the dark kitchen alcove. The flashlight beam caught the polished metal of the range.

The stockpot, sitting on the stove.

Cold dread draped over her. She had been melting stockpots of snow to slack her thirst for two days. Using the kerosene heaters had seemed impossibly slow. The gas worked quickly, and she had rationalized the expenditure, telling herself she would adjust the generator’s load later.

But had she?  She couldn’t remember.

Could she have been so foolish?

But she had been so thirsty.

She was thirsty right now.

Stella slammed her fist onto the tabletop, willing herself to focus.  At 8%, the generator would run no more than six hours—probably less.  Her backup batteries for the infusion pump typically would be good for 24 hours, but in the dropping temperature, the cells would deplete twice as fast.

Eighteen hours. That was her most optimistic window before the infusion pump became a $5000 block of dead circuits, sensors, and motors.

Stella looked across the table at the final refrigeration case.  The MCR-S bag lay nestled among the cold packs. Protocol four full days or optimization before her body could safely handle the final stage.

She didn’t have four days. She had eighteen hours.

Stella sat in the chair, the cabin dark around her.  Only the soft glow of the kerosene heater and the cold shimmer of the aurora outside cut the gloom.

Absent the generator’s reliable chug, the world was preternaturally quiet.  Tiny sounds seemed amplified: an ice-laden branch cracking, the squeak of the floorboards, the hum of the infusion pump’s motor.

She had waited as long as she could, balancing the batteries’ strength against the time needed for the infusion.  That balance had been nine hours.

Wait longer and the infusion might fail, and the optimized changes it was supposed to lock in would continue unchecked through her body.

Which they already were.

Her body’s morphological changes were apparent. The budding bones of the antlers had sprouted incredibly fast and begun branching.

Looking in the mirror, Stella saw less of herself than ever.  The hair on her body was dense, almost like fur.  Her shoulders had broadened and her chest expanded, hinting at anatomical redevelopment.  Her fingers were thicker and less dexterous.  The structure of her face shifted like drifting continental plates, pushed by an unseen force.

And her eyes.

More accurately, what looked back at her from those eyes.

Stella had considered her options.

Take the last serum bag and leave, while she still had a couple of days.

And go where?

A hospital?

A clinic?

MyCel Biotech?

The last one filled her with instinctive dread, like an animal for fire.

Stella looked at the serum bag dangling above.  The fluid glinted with a magical metallic shimmer.

She fumbled through the hair on her forearm to palpate the port.  Her fingers took longer to attach the line.  She turned the valve to start the flow of serum.  The shot of vodka she’d poured sat untouched.

Thirty-six hours ahead of protocol, she thought.

Not warmth.  Not static.

Shards of ice.

Stella’s arm jerked spasmodically as the serum entered her bloodstream.  In seconds it was tearing its way through her.  Her body convulsed, her joints locked.  Powerful shudders ran the length of her.  Her toes clenched and cramped.  She urinated.  She pitched forward to retch, but only thin strings of saliva and hoarse grunts came out.

White lights blazed around her.  Electronic alarms chirped and whined.  Shadows shifted at her vision’s periphery.  The stench of antiseptic filled her nostrils, making her lean forward again, gagging.

Noises that might be voices.

“…grand mal seizure—inner cranial pressure…”

“…administer midazolam—5 mg…”

“…family’s in the waiting room…”

Her hands squeezed her temples.

Crack!  Crack-crack-crack!

The weight of her head shifted as the bony protuberances erupted in new growth.  Her jaw stretched wide to emit her scream, and she felt it reshape itself.  Her heart pounded, forcing veins and arteries to swell to accept the blood flow. MCR – S gushed through her like a frozen river of light.

Blackness swallowed her.

Stella opened her eyes. She slumped in the—sitting thing.  The—box—beeped steadily beside her.

She stirred, focused.

The infusion bag swung on the pole, emptied.

Completed.

She labored to detach the line from her arm, her fingers all thumbs.

She lumbered to her feet, holding the table for support.

She had rushed the protocol.  Introduced the serum too soon.  Optimize was still working.  She’d forced a new vector.

Side effects were to be expected.

She was still alive.

That’s what mattered.

She needed to record her notes, she thought.  Before the immediacy wore off.  

Her logbook lay open on the table.  She grasped at it, holding the pages close to her face.

She could not decipher the lines and swirls she’d written just a day ago.  It was meaningless gibberish now.  Page after page.  She dropped the logbook on the table and picked up a file with cleanly typed text.  Glyphs in a dead language.

She threw the folder down.

The digital recorder lay in the center of the table.  Stella clutched it, staring at the LED screen.  The little icons made no sense to her.  From memory she pushed the rewind button.  A small arrow appeared next to a line of text she could not read.  She thumbed the play button, and heard her own voice from the speaker.  But the voice was not speaking words.  A sing-song kind of trilling, punctuated by whistles and grunts and guttural mumblings.  Stella skipped to the next message, and the next, and the next. Each entry was the sound of her voice, but unintelligible. 

Steadier, she went into the bedroom, to the mirror. A battery-powered camp light hung next to it, giving off an unpleasant, unnatural light.  Looking at herself, she froze, stunned.

The antlers had branched off again, a thin layer of velvety tissue forming around them.  Blood dribbled around the bases where fresh growth pushed through her flesh. Dark brown irises fully covered her eyes.  Once aquiline features displayed heavier bone structure beneath her stretched skin.

Stella stared at her reflection with both clinical detachment and wonder. She could not distinguish where Stella Harrow ended and the genetic alterations began.

She wasn’t herself.

She wasn’t an animal.

A hybrid creature.

“And the Nobel Prize for Physiology is awarded to…”

The new Pasteur?

Dr. Jekyll?

Stella backed away from the mirror with an awkward gait.  She walked back into the main room and looked around the once familiar space. Some things she knew and understood their purpose—

—The thing to sit on.

—The thing that held water.

—The thing that blocked the way to the outdoors.

She just could not summon up the names.

But she could think.  She could reason.

“Okay,” she reasoned.  “What now?”

She looked out the window, where the—moving thing—that brought her here sat crested with snow and ice.

She hadn’t thought much beyond taking the last infusion.  She had fuel to run the heaters.  But to what point?  With her infusion protocol complete, she had no reason to stay at the cabin.  Once stabilized, the plan had been to wait for good weather and drive back to civilization, bearing her data and the elixir to cure mankind.

But now, how would she present these discoveries? She couldn’t read her notes or understand her recordings. Where would the changes stop? What if they didn’t stop?

The place—with the machines.  The man.  If she took the information to him, he could read it.  He would understand.  He would help.

Stella’s thoughts trailed off.  She remembered what he was like—what he’d trained her to be.  Push the boundaries, break the rules, be there first.  Discover, patent, produce.

She reached up and touched her antlers delicately.  Hard bone.  Soft velvet.

He would take one look at her hybrid expressions.  Claim proprietary over all her research, her work—her very body.  Secret labs, trials, modifications, expansions.  Stella, not a scientist leading the research.  A lab animal for testing.

What would he do with a serum like MCR?

What would he not do?

Movement outside the window.

Stella’s head snapped around, instantly alert.

A shape standing in the yard, silhouetted in the gloom.

A man’s shape.

Stella went to the window, pressing her nose against the cold glass.

Standing there—unmoving.  Facing her.

Antlers coming out of his head.  A full, beautiful rack.

Stella gasped.  She pressed her hand against the pane.

The shape transformed.  Not a man.  A reindeer.  A large, single buck.

A trick of the light.

Still, she was happy to see it.

Something moved in her head—white light flooded her vision.

She gasped and stumbled.

She saw ceiling tiles above her.

A shadow bent over her.  Not like the others.  Familiar.  Back to childhood.

A soft touch on her cheek.

Her name, her childhood name.  

“Stella Bella…”

Darkness seeped in. The shapes of the cabin returned.  Stella leaned against the window, antlers bumping the glass.

Her protocol was a success.  The mycelium had shown the way—the reindeer DNA had conquered the tumor and healed the damaged brain tissue, the seat of her knowledge and identity.

But it hadn’t stopped there.

It had transformed her into something else.

Something beautiful and unique.

If MyCel Biotech got their hands on her serum, they wouldn’t cure diseases. The man would engineer an elite tier of proprietary, patent-protected life. A miracle turned into an industry. 

It came over her in a rush, and she sank to the floor.  The sadness welled up inside her so fast she barely opened her mouth before the grief-stricken sob broke past her lips.  She sobbed without tears.

Only humans cry tears.

She wasn’t going back.  She wasn’t going anywhere.

She would not die of cancer.  But she would disappear all the same.  With no one knowing what she had accomplished.  Something beyond.  Something magnificent.  Something that could never be revealed.  Like the caribou on the wall, they would make her a trophy to display.

She sobbed until the last gray light leaked from the sky, and deep shadows filled the room.  She was no longer thirsty; arctic animals subsist on their own metabolism for water.  She’d read that when she was a little girl, in this cabin, wearing a crown of construction paper antlers.

She sat up and looked across the room, at the table laden with her notes and files and disk drives and research. 

Her life’s work.  Her legacy.  Out of her control.

They mustn’t find it, she thought suddenly.  He mustn’t find it.

Her gaze fell on the red containers, lined up neatly against the wall.

Her heart broke again.

Stella clambered to her feet, her legs not moving the way they should.  She spilled the papers out of their folders and binders, building a pyre on the table top.  She grabbed the empty infusion bags from the biowaste bin and threw them on the table.  All her samples.  All her notes.  The stupid recorder that had never worked properly.

She dragged two red containers to the table.  They were heavy but she was strong now.  She lifted them and poured the reeking oily fluid out, soaking the papers, splashing her laptop and equipment.  She emptied the rest around the cabin, sloshing liquid over the furniture, floor, walls, bedding, cabinets.  The smell was noxious and almost overpowering.

She stomped into the kitchen, looking around for the stick that when clicked produced a flame.  It was in a drawer. How did it open?  She couldn’t remember.

Focus—focus—focus!

Focus.

Her eyes landed on the box that made heat, sitting in the corner, emitting a soft orange glow.  There was fire.

She moved quickly to it.  Lifting it over her head, she threw it hard onto the floor next to the table.  It flared quickly and rolled against the table leg.  The orange glow faded.

Stella emitted a guttural snarl.  There was another box in the bedroom.  She brought it out, held high.  She stopped herself.  She set the box, still glowing, on the floor.

Focus, and think.

With her curled and clumsy fingers she grabbed sheets of paper.  She twisted them and nudged open the box.  A yellow light shone out like a beacon.  She stuck the papers in until they touched the flame inside.  They smoked, then caught.  Stella pulled the papers out and held them aloft.

The highest province of man—she wielded fire.

She dropped the burning bundle onto the table.  It languished for a split second, then faint blue flames blazed yellow and spread outward across the pile.

Like a virus.  Like a cancer.

Stella stepped back from the wall of heat.  The tabletop was engulfed in dark orange flames, black smoke boiled towards the ceiling.  Flakes of burning paper rose and drifted like snowflakes, settling around the room.  Where they landed, flames began licking up.

The smoke would take her first.  She would never feel the flames.  There must be nothing left.  No data.  No specimens.

She dragged the thing that you sit on away from the blaze and sat down.

Deep breaths.  It won’t take long.

Smoke and heat burned her eyes, making them run.  She could still cry, after all.

A feeling grew inside her.

An urge to flee.

She pushed it down.

It has to be this way.

Does it?

Stella shifted.

She must disappear—consumed in the fire.

Or not.  She could disappear without dying.

She looked towards the window, hazy through the smoke, at the black line of trees under the glowing sky.

There.  Out there.  Deep.  Hidden.

Alone.

Not alone.

Through the fire reflected brightly on the glass, she saw a dim orange glow lighting the yard.  Just at the edge, the buck stood.  Still.  Watching.

Not alone.  With my kind.

There was a screech of wood splitting and a pop-pop-pop of resin exploding.  Everything went white for a moment and a hand held hers.  Alarms screeched.  She coughed.

She coughed harder, and sprang up, dashing for the thing that blocked the way outside.  Outside, in the cold.  In the dark.  In the wild.

Her frantic amygdala-driven instincts pushed her to escape.  She struck the planks of wood with both hands, pounding.  It opened somehow—how?  She had to turn something.  A  metal knob.  Her fingers grasped at it, but could not grip it.  She tugged and pushed.  She kicked and screamed, coughing in painful spasms.

Her head felt light.  Her antlers swayed.

She felt the fire at her back, singing her downy fur.  She flailed along the wall, reaching the window and hitting the glass with her fists, with her antlers.  It shook, but didn’t shatter.

In the yard the buck stood, like a statue.

Stella put her hands to her mouth, trying in vain to strain out the cloying smoke.  Her lungs burned, and she heaved poisoned breaths, forcing her towards blind panic.

The thing you sit—chair! She saw the chair, tendrils of smoke drifting up from the upholstery.  In a moment it, too, would be ablaze.  Shoving down her fear she rushed forward and grabbed it, dragging it toward the window. Something caught her wrist.  She looked down at the purple wristband, snagged on the arm of the chair.

Stella Harrow. DOB: 8/12/83 Patient. DNR

She snatched her arm back.  The band’s plastic buttons popped.  The strap fell to the floor, shriveling in the flames.

Stella braced her legs, hoisted the chair and flung it at the window.  It crashed through the glass, tumbling across the porch.  She bounded through the frame, skittering across the icy porch, shards of glass slicing her bare feet.

The cabin inhaled the cold air and the fire, nourished on fresh oxygen, roared.  Flames lapped at the rafters and raced up the walls.  The caribou burst into flames, toppling onto the floor.  Glass shattered and smoke roiled out, a thick black pillar rising over the cabin to the treetops, where the wind caught it and swept in southward.

Stella tripped over the porch railing and hit the frozen ground.  She scrambled up and darted away from the cabin to the copse of trees.  She stood, coughing, staring as the fire consumed the cabin.

She heard a snuffling sound behind her.  She turned.  The buck stood, two meters away.  His big dark eyes seemed to contemplate her.  She stared back, slowly recovering her breath, her quivering nerves settling.

From the darkness more shapes emerged.  Another antlered reindeer.  Then another.  And another.  Soon she could discern twenty or more just at the edge of the forest.  They looked at her placidly.  She stepped forward.  They did not retreat.

Stella looked back at the cabin.  Flames cast bright light and flickering shadows across the snow.  By dawn, there would be nothing left.

She turned back to the herd.  Her feet sank in the snow.  She didn’t feel the cold.

The buck turned and began to march into the forest.  Without haste, the herd followed.  They disappeared into the woods, antlers moving among the brush like branches stirred by the breeze.

The buck stopped and turned, looking at her.  Stella took a step forward, towards the woods, following the herd.

Not alone.

She tugged the ripped and scorched flannel shirt off and let it fall to the ground.  Cold air became trapped in the hairs of her body, warmed by her skin.

She looked up at the sky.  The aurora was twisting in bright greens and blues.  It billowed and shifted like a curtain in the breeze.  Somewhere behind her she heard a long, steady, electronic tone.

Stella straightened her shoulders and lifted her head.  Her branching antlers reached skyward.

She walked into the dark forest.