Chapter 3: The Interrogation
The broken window in Miley’s apartment had been hastily covered with a flattened cardboard box and duct tape, a flimsy shield against the night and the memory of what had just happened. Miley sat on her futon, wrapped in a superhero blanket, shaking quietly. She wasn’t crying anymore. She was just cold, deep in her bones.
“We can’t stay here,” Jess said, her voice low. She was examining the ragged edges of the window frame, her medical mind assessing structural integrity versus psychological trauma. “She knows where this is. She could come back.”
“Where do we go?” Alex asked, her own adrenaline ebbing, leaving a hollow, scared feeling behind. The apartment smelled of fear now, overriding the vanilla and solder.
The main door to the apartment—a standard tiny-scale door—blew inward.
Not from a kick. From a gust of air so powerful it ripped the hinges clean off the frame. The door clattered across the floor, revealing not a giantess in the hall, but the toe of an immense sneaker, the woven fabric like the side of a building. Ellie Vance knelt, her face filling the entire shattered doorway, her dark hair cascading down like a midnight avalanche. Her eyes, wide and frantic, scanned the room.
“Girls!” Her voice was a controlled tremor, a dam holding back a flood. “Are you hurt?”
“Mom!” Alex yelped, a mixture of relief and fresh fear colliding.
Ellie’s finger, as wide as a couch, slid carefully into the room, its tip coming to rest gently on the floor between them. A silent, tactile check-in. “We’re leaving. Now. All of you. Come.”
“What’s happening?” Jess demanded, not moving. “Sloane was just here. She took the chip.”
Ellie’s eye closed for a brief second. A storm of emotions crossed her features—anger, profound weariness, a fear so sharp it seemed to cut her from the inside. “I know. I found her. We… talked.” The word ‘talked’ sounded like it involved structural damage. “Get on my hand. There’s no time.”
There was a finality in her tone that brooked no argument. They climbed onto the vast, warm plain of her palm, Miley stumbling, helped up by Jess. Ellie lifted them, cradling them with a precision that was both second nature and intensely focused, and stood. The world lurched dizzyingly as she turned and began to stride through the city, her steps eating the blocks.
They were placed with exquisite care on the wobbly plastic table in the center of the Vance living room. The familiar chaos of the space—the faded political posters, the maps dotted with Jess’s cynical annotations, the scent of stale popcorn—felt different now. It felt like a bunker.
Ellie loomed over them, her hands braced on her knees. Her face was grim.
“The chip Sloane recovered contained a frequency,” she began, her voice stripped of all its usual stern doting. It was flat. Technical. Deadly. “A kill-switch signal. It’s not for one drone. It’s a broadcast code designed to activate a series of devices placed across multiple tiny districts in the city. Explosive devices. Planted in infrastructure points—water mains, electrical substations, support columns for the elevated walkways.”
The words hung in the air, too big, too terrible to absorb at once.
Miley finally spoke, her voice a rasp. “A bomb? In our water pipe?”
“Not a bomb. Bombs. Plural,” Ellie corrected, her gaze touching each of them. “The ‘ghost’ Sloane mentioned isn’t a person. It’s a syndicate. A group of giants who believe the ‘Tiny Problem’ is best solved permanently. They’ve been acquiring outdated municipal drones, retrofitting them with military-grade control chips like the one you found, and using them to place these charges. The broadcast is set for dawn.”
Jess sat down hard on the edge of the table. “Extermination,” she whispered, the clinical word feeling filthy in her mouth.
“Why?” Alex burst out. “Why would anyone… we’re people!”
“To them, you’re a drain. A nuisance. A sentimental liability,” a new, bored voice cut in.
Sloane Merrick stood in the arched doorway to the kitchen, having entered the apartment with a silence that was unnerving for someone her size. She leaned against the frame, arms crossed, a smudge of grease on her cheek. She looked at Ellie, not the tinies. “They’re insects with voting rights and plumbing. That’s the rhetoric. I downloaded the data before I crushed the chip.”
Ellie didn’t flinch at her arrival. “You’re supposed to be disabling the broadcast transmitter.”
“I found it. It’s in a secured facility on the docks. Heavy physical and digital locks. I can bypass the digital. The physical access requires getting inside a conduit that’s roughly,” she glanced down at the table, her eyes flicking over Alex, “five and a half feet in diameter. It’s a maintenance crawlspace for the old heating system. My finger won’t fit. And before you ask, no, I don’t have any tiny accomplices. I don’t use insects for work.”
Ellie’s jaw tightened. “These are my children, Sloane.”
“I see that. It’s your defining flaw.” Sloane pushed off the doorway and took two steps into the living room, making the floorboards groan. She looked at the trio on the table. Her gaze was analytical, devoid of malice but also devoid of compassion. “But the situation is this: I can locate and jam the broadcast signal from outside. To destroy the transmitter, someone small needs to go in, place a shaped charge I will provide, and get out. The syndicate patrols the perimeter. They are not sentimental.”
“You want us to help you?” Jess asked, incredulous.
“I want one of you to help me. The one with the highest probability of not freezing or crying or getting themselves killed in a ventilation shaft.” Sloane’s eyes settled on Alex. “The one who, against all better judgment, keeps showing up in the middle of things.”
“No,” Ellie said, the word absolute.
“Eleanor,” Sloane said, using Ellie’s full name with a shocking softness. “The sun comes up in six hours. My way stops the signal. It doesn’t find the bombs. They’ll try again. We need the transmitter’s core data to locate all the devices. This is the only play. You designed this city’s tiny access points. You know I’m right.”
The silence that followed was suffocating. The faded posters on the walls seemed to watch. The drawn maps whispered of hidden pathways and dead ends.
Alex felt it before she thought it—the pull, the terrifying, stupid curiosity. The need to see the secret room, to beat the monster, to be more than just a potential victim in someone else’s story. She met Sloane’s Arctic eyes.
“What would I have to do?”
“Alex!” Ellie and Jess said in unison, one voice a roar, the other a gasp.
Sloane almost smiled. It didn’t reach her eyes. “You’d wear a comms bead. I’d talk you through the crawlspace. You’d place a device the size of a gumdrop on a marked panel. Then you’d run like hell back the way you came. I’d handle the rest.”
“And if I get caught?”
“Then you’ll be dead long before I could intervene,” Sloane said, with clinical honesty. “But you won’t get caught. You’re small, you’re fast, and you have a unnervingly high tolerance for personal risk. They won’t be looking for you. They’re looking for someone like me.”
Ellie was shaking her head, her whole massive body radiating a no that vibrated through the table. But her eyes were on the clock. The minutes were bleeding away.
Jess grabbed Alex’s arm. “This isn’t an adventure, Alex! This is a suicide mission handed to you by a giant who doesn’t care if you live or die!”
“I know,” Alex said, and she did. She looked from Jess’s terrified face to her mother’s anguished one, then to Sloane’s impatient neutrality. “But it’s also the only way to find the bombs. For everyone.”
Miley, still wrapped in her blanket, spoke up, her voice steadier now. “I can modify the comms bead. Boost the signal, add a biometric monitor. So they know if you… stop.”
Sloane gave a single, curt nod. “Useful. Do it.”
The decision hung in the balance, a fragile, terrible thing. Ellie finally closed her eyes. When she opened them, they were glistening, but her voice was iron. “You will follow her instructions exactly. You will not deviate. You will come home.”
It wasn’t permission. It was a command edged with a prayer.
“Okay,” Alex said, her heart hammering against her ribs like it wanted to escape.
Sloane looked at the clock. “We move in ninety minutes. Gear up.” She turned to leave, then paused, glancing back at Ellie. “I’ll bring her back, Eleanor. Not because I care about the insect. Because I owe you.”
She left the room, her footsteps fading. The plan was set. The countdown had begun. And Alex Vance, art student, adopted tiny, professional nuisance, sat in the center of her chaotic living room and tried to remember how to breathe.
The ninety minutes vanished in a blur of hushed arguments, frantic preparation, and Miley’s trembling fingers splicing wires onto a comms bead no bigger than a lentil. Ellie loomed, a silent mountain of dread, her fingers constantly moving—adjusting Alex’s dark clothing, checking the seal on her miniature respirator, actions that were love made physical.
“The charge is magnetized,” Sloane’s voice rumbled from the kitchen where she was assembling the device. “Slap it on the red panel. Don’t think. Just attach it and reverse your path.”
Jess shoved a lightweight med-kit into Alex’s pocket. “For contamination or particulate exposure. Not for… anything else.” Her eyes were red “If you die, I will never forgive you.”
“I’ll be fine,” Alex lied, her voice thin.
Miley fitted the bead into Alex’s ear. It clicked, cold and final. “Channel is open. We’ll hear everything. Your vitals are on my pad.” She didn’t let go of Alex’s hand for a second. “Thank you. For before.”
Then there was no more time. Sloane’s shadow fell across them all. She held out her closed fist, knuckles down, and opened it. Her palm was a vast, lined landscape. “Clock’s ticking. Get on.”
Ellie’s breath hitched. She bent down, bringing her face so close her exhale stirred Alex’s hair. “Listen to her. Come home to me.” The words were a raw whisper, a fissure in her stern exterior.
Alex nodded, unable to speak. She stepped onto the calloused skin.
Sloane’s fingers closed.
It wasn’t like being held by Ellie. Ellie’s grip was communication, a language of care and caution. This was storage. Efficient, secure containment. The pressure was firm, unyielding, leaving Alex in a dim pocket of space, curled against the giantess’s warm, dry skin. She could feel the immense power of the tendons in the fingers wrapped around her, a cage of living bone and muscle.
As Sloane stood and began to move, the world became a violent, lurching ride. Alex was jostled with every stride, the rhythmic compression of the fist both predictable and terrifying.
“Sloane?” Alex’s voice was muffled by denim and flesh.
No response. Just the thunderous rhythm of footsteps eating pavement.
“Can you hear me? What’s the plan when we—”
The fingers tightened incrementally, not enough to crush, but enough to squeeze the air from Alex’s lungs and make black spots dance in her vision. It was a blunt, physical message. Shut up.
The journey passed in a nauseating, silent darkness. The sounds of the city filtered in—distant horns, the rumble of other giants, the shriek of a train on elevated tracks. Then the air changed. It grew damp and cold, smelling of diesel, salt, and rotten fish. The docks.
The motion stopped. Alex heard the grinding squeal of a massive rusted hatch being pulled aside. Sloane’s voice was a low, contained vibration she felt more than heard. “Clear. For now.”
The fist uncurled. Alex tumbled onto a cold, gritty metal surface, catching herself on hands and knees. They were in the shadow of a towering cargo container. Above her, Sloane was a column of darkness against a sliver of night sky, her face obscured.
A few feet away, a circular ventilation grate, spotted with rust, was set into the foundation of a vast warehouse. It was just wide enough.
“Turn your comm bead on,” Sloane commanded, her eyes scanning the shadows between containers.
Alex fumbled with her ear. “It’s on. Miley, Jess, you there?”
A crackle, then Jess’s voice, tight with strain. “We read you. Vital signs are… elevated.”
“No kidding,” Alex muttered.
Sloane pointed a finger the size of a tree trunk at the vent. “That’s your entry. Fifty meters straight in, then a left junction. The transmitter room is twenty meters down that shaft. Red access panel on the north wall. Place the charge.”
Alex approached the grate. The darkness beyond was absolute. She looked back up at the indistinct giantess. “What happens if I get caught in there?”
Sloane finally looked down at her. The expression wasn’t cruel. It was emptier than that. It was the look of someone stating the weather.
She shrugged, a small quake of her shoulders. “Best case? You get squashed instantly by a boot. Clean. Worst case?” She paused, as if calculating. “They’ll be angry. A tiny in their secure facility. They might not be quick. You could spend a few unpleasant minutes being digested in a giantess’s stomach before you suffocate. Try to avoid it.”
The clinical description hung in the salty air. Behind the comms bead, Alex heard Jess’s sharp inhale.
“Sloane!” Ellie’s voice roared through the tiny speaker, distorted by fury and horror.
Sloane ignored the voice from the bead. Her attention was back on the perimeter. “Go. Or don’t. The dawn won’t wait for your courage.”
Alex looked at the dark hole, then at the colossal, indifferent figure. Her mouth was dry. Her hands shook. She pulled the small magnetic charge from her belt.
Without another word, she knelt, grabbed the rusted grate, and pulled herself into the swallowing dark.