Chapter 2: Ticking Hunger
The hunger wasn’t a metaphor.
It lived behind Elliot’s navel, a clenched, acidic fist that twisted with every heartbeat. He stood in the center of their living room, a monument of stupid, sculpted meat, and tried to think through the pain. The coat was suffocating, but without it, he was a spectacle. His back ached from the sheer mass of it all.
Across the room, Liv had surrendered to the new geometry of her body. She lay sprawled on the ruined couch, a valley of cushions forming around her exaggerated hips. She’d found an old, oversized sports jersey in a box and was wearing it like a dress. One hand absently traced the dramatic curve of her waist, over and over, as if mapping alien terrain.
“My joints feel… loose,” she said, her melodic voice tight. “Like everything’s floating. And I’m so cold. All the time.”
“Increased surface area to volume ratio,” Elliot muttered, pacing. His new gait was a wide, awkward waddle. “You redesigned your thermodynamics. Your base metabolic rate must be through the roof. We’re both burning calories just maintaining this… this shape.”
“Don’t say ‘shape’. It makes me feel like a Play-Doh factory.” She tried to laugh, but it came out as a shiver. She pulled her knees up, the movement strangely graceful. “Do you think the hunger is the same? For both of us?”
“No. Mine feels… granular. Like my cells are screaming for raw material. Yours sounded hormonal. Different fuel.” He stopped, his massive head swinging toward her. “Did you feel that?”
A subtle vibration hummed through the floorboards. Not from the street. It came from their bedroom, from the PC. A second later, both their phones chimed in perfect, sinister unison.
Elliot fumbled his out. The screen was a warning siren of red.
STABILITY CRITICAL.
USER: ATLAS. BIOMASS DEPLETION. CATABOLIC STATE IMMINENT.
USER: LIV. ENDOCRINE IMBALANCE. NEURAL CHEMISTRY DEGRADING.
SOURCE REQUIRED. NON-COMPLIANCE = SYSTEM COLLAPSE.
ACQUISITION WINDOW: 63 MINUTES.
“An hour,” Liv breathed. The color drained from her perfect, plush cheeks. “What does ‘catabolic state’ mean?”
“It means my body starts eating its own muscle tissue to survive. Imagine your own pecs digesting themselves. From the inside.” His dry wit had turned to ash. “And ‘neural chemistry degrading’… that could be mood swings. Psychosis. Brain fog. Seizures.”
“So we’re not just hungry. We’re dying. In new and exciting ways.” She uncurled herself, standing up. The casual motion made the jersey ride up, revealing a long, sleek line of thigh. She didn’t seem to notice. “The address. We have to go.”
“It’s a warehouse district on the old piers. No cameras. Maximum sketch.” Elliot’s new jaw worked. “We have five thousand dollars of mysterious money. We are, objectively, a walking liability and a traffic-stopper. This is how people become organ donor statistics.”
Liv walked to the cracked balcony window, looking out at the bleary, predawn city. Her reflection was a ghost in the glass—a stunning, haunted stranger. “We don’t have a choice, Elliot. We can’t reverse this without stabilizing first. Your code is a locked black box. This is the only door.”
He knew she was right. The logic was inescapable, and it tasted like bile. He lumbered toward the door, the hunger gnawing a deeper hole with every step. “Then we go. We get the stuff. We don’t talk to anyone. We don’t make eye contact. We are ghosts.”
“Ghosts,” Liv echoed, without conviction. She pulled on a pair of Elliot’s sweatpants under the jersey, rolling the waistband over and over until they sort of stayed up. She found a beanie and stuffed all the blonde hair into it, then threw the hood of the coat up. In the dim light, she could almost pass for a sickly, slender guy. Almost.
Elliot had no such hope. The coat made him look like a bouncer for a Victorian opium den. His neck was a tree trunk. His hands, swinging at his sides, were brutal-looking things.
They slipped into the hallway. The fluorescent light was merciless. The elevator was a tin coffin they couldn’t risk. They took the stairs, their footsteps a discordant rhythm—his a deep, groaning protest from the concrete, hers a light, frantic tap.
The night air hit them in the parking garage, humid and smelling of oil and stale trash. Elliot’s car, a decade-old compact, seemed like a cruel joke. He folded himself into the driver’s seat, his shoulders pressing hard against both door and window. The steering wheel disappeared in his grip. He looked like a grown man crammed into a child’s pedal car.
Liv slid into the passenger side, her new proportions making the seatbelt cut awkwardly across her chest. She hissed, fumbling to adjust it.
“This is ridiculous,” Elliot grumbled, turning the key. The engine coughed to life.
“You’re telling me.” She pulled down the sun visor, staring at her reflection in the little mirror. She peeled the beanie back an inch. The blonde hair spilled out. She had dark circles under her stunning eyes. “I look like a supermodel who went three rounds with a depression.”
“Focus, Liv.” He backed out, the car leaning heavily on its shocks. “The address. Navigation’s set. Thirty-two minutes.”
The city slid by, a smear of closed shops and sodium-vapor ghosts. They didn’t speak. The silence was filled with the sound of their own breathing, the gurgle of Elliot’s starving stomach, and the low thrum of the engine. The app’s countdown was a phantom pulse in their veins.
The streets grew narrower, the buildings lower and darker. The nice part of town had been amputated. They entered a landscape of chain-link fences, corrugated steel, and the distant, oily shimmer of the river.
“This is it,” Elliot whispered, pulling over a block away. The warehouse was a long, low-slung shadow against the slightly less dark sky. One orange security light buzzed over a rolling metal door, flickering epileptically. No other cars. No movement.
The hunger in Elliot’s gut clenched, a vice. A sudden, sharp pain lanced through his left bicep. He gasped, grabbing his arm. The muscle beneath the skin felt… granular. Spongy.
“It’s starting,” he said, his voice thick.
Liv was breathing in short, quick pants. She wiped at her forehead. Her hand came away slick. “I can’t… my thoughts are getting muddy. Like static.”
“Okay. Okay. We walk. We get the package. We leave.” Elliot’s plan was tissue paper in a hurricane. He opened his door, the groan of the hinges absurdly loud.
They crunched across gravel and broken asphalt. The river smell was stronger here—algae, rust, and decay. The buzzing light painted their approaching shadows long and grotesque on the warehouse wall.
A smaller, human-sized door was set into the larger rolling one. It was slightly ajar.
Elliot’s every instinct screamed. This was the part in the movie where the idiots die. He glanced at Liv. She was staring at the door with a terrifying blankness, her beautiful face slack.
He pushed the door. It swung open with a low, metal whine.
The space inside was cavernous, echoing, and nearly dark. High windows, grimy with decades of filth, let in weak slivers of distant city glow. The air was cold and smelled of concrete dust and something else—a sharp, clinical odor, like antiseptic and ozone.
In the very center of the empty floor, under a single dangling bulb that illuminated nothing else, sat two plain, gray, plastic coolers.
No people. No instructions. Just the coolers.
And the smell.
The smell was the worst part—it wasn't just antiseptic. Underneath it was the sweet, coppery scent of blood plasma and something metabolic, like overheated iron.
“It smells like a hospital dumpster,” Liv whispered, her voice echoing slightly.
Elliot’s muscles trembled, not from fear but from depletion. The pain in his bicep was a steady, hot drill. He moved forward, each step deliberate. The concrete was icy under his thin soles. The single bulb above the coolers cast a pitiless white circle, making the rest of the warehouse seem to recede into infinite black.
The coolers were industrial, the kind used for organ transport. He knelt, the action stiff and noisy in the quiet. His massive hands fumbled with the first latch. It popped open with a pressurized hiss.
Inside, nestled in custom-cut blue foam, were rows of clear vials. Each vial was filled with an oily, amber liquid. Next to them lay auto-injector pens, sleek and black. A single sheet of thermal paper lay on top.
Elliot picked it up. The printing was the same bland font as the app.
Atlas: Anabolic-Catabolic Stabilizer. 5000mg/ml. Intramuscular. Administer when tremors begin.
Liv: Endocrine Synth. 200mg/ml. Subcutaneous. Administer when dissociation occurs.
“It has names for us,” he said flatly.
The second cooler held more of the same, but also small boxes of dense, brick-colored bars wrapped in sterile foil. The label read Metabolic Subsistence – Protein/Lipid Matrix. It looked like laboratory putty.
“No instructions on dosage. No company logo. Nothing.” Liv had crept up behind him. She reached into the cooler marked for her, her slender fingers closing around a vial. It was warm to the touch. “It’s body temperature.”
“Of course it is,” Elliot muttered. He grabbed one of his vials and an injector. His hands were shaking badly now, making the liquid swirl. The compulsion was immediate, a primal pull in his gut that synced with the vial in his hand. “We’re supposed to just shoot this mystery juice into our veins. In a creepy warehouse.”
“You’re shaking,” Liv observed. Her own breathing had become uneven, shallow. She stared past his shoulder at nothing. “My head feels… floaty. Like I’m watching this from very far away. Dissociation. That’s what it said.”
Elliot looked from the injector to his own colossal, failing arm. The choice was an illusion. He ripped the cap off the pen with his teeth, pressed the tip against the strained fabric over his quad, and thumbed the button.
A sharp, cold pinch flooded his thigh, followed instantly by a spreading heat that felt like liquid magma entering his bloodstream. He grunted, falling back onto his ass on the cold concrete. The heat radiated outward, up his torso, down his leg, a wave of cellular satiation. The gnawing, granular hunger vanished, replaced by a profound, heavy fullness. The trembling stopped.
The relief was so intense it was almost erotic. He shuddered.
Liv watched him, her expression distant. Then she mimicked his actions, fumbling with her own pen. She injected it into the pale skin of her abdomen, flinching at the prick.
Her reaction was different. A sharp gasp, then a slow, melting relaxation. The vague panic in her eyes receded, replaced by a lucid, hyper-focused calm. The unnatural chill left her skin. Color returned to her cheeks.
“Oh,” she said softly, blinking. “That’s… better. It’s so much better.”
For a minute, they just sat on the floor in the pool of light, listening to their own bodies settle. The artificial stability was a blanket, smothering the immediate terror. It felt like a ceasefire, not a peace.
Elliot finally moved, stuffing vials and bars into the pockets of his straining coat. Liv did the same, her movements now smooth, almost predatory in their efficiency.
“We can’t go home like this,” she said, looking down at Elliot’s coat, which was split at the seams across his shoulders. A long tear ran down his back. Her own getup was a sad costume of fabric and desperation. “We look like we just looted a mad scientist’s lab. Which, I guess, we did.”
Elliot stood, feeling the new, false strength in his limbs. The weight was still there, but it was manageable now, a powered exoskeleton. “We have the mystery money. We need clothes that fit. Actually fit. Not just hide.” The logic was practical, a problem he could solve. “There’s a 24-hour big-box store off the interstate. It’ll have basics.”
The drive there was silent, but the tension had changed. The raw, scraping fear was now a low, humming dread. They were maintaining a borrowed form with stolen medicine. The clock was still ticking, they just couldn’t feel the teeth of it anymore.
The store’s fluorescence was an assault. It was three in the morning, and the only other souls were a tired-looking stock crew and a lone cashier. Muzak whispered from the ceiling tiles.
Liv headed for the women’s athletic wear with a new, unsettling purpose. Elliot lumbered toward the men’s section, a giant in a landscape of folded polos and denim.
He stood before a wall of plain t-shirts, utterly lost. His old size was a memory. He grabbed the largest size they had—an XXXL—and held it up. It looked like a child’s garment against the expanse of his chest.
“Forget it,” Liv’s voice came from beside him. She had an armful of clothing in dark colors. “You need performance fabric. Stretch. This way.” She led him to the workout section.
She picked out muscle tanks and tight, stretch-fitted t-shirts designed for bodybuilders. The fabrics were thin and technical. “These will contain the… geography.” She held a black tank up to his shoulders. “This might work.”
In the dressing room, Elliot peeled off the destroyed coat and his tattered shirt. The full visual of himself in the mirror under the bright lights was still a shock. The injected stability had defined him further; every vein, every striation was pronounced. The black tank top she’d chosen was painted onto him. It stretched taut over the cannonballs of his deltoids, the fabric straining across his pecs but just barely holding. It felt like a second skin, revealing everything while technically covering it.
He looked like a cartoon of strength. He hated it.
Liv’s transformation was more aesthetic. She chose pieces that embraced the new form rather than hid it. High-waisted leggings that showcased the dramatic sweep of her hips and the curve of her ass. A cropped, tight athletic top with a built-in shelf bra that offered support and revealed a precise sliver of toned midriff. A second outfit consisted of impossibly soft, faded jeans that clung to every inch and a simple v-neck t-shirt that plunged just enough to hint at the new fullness beneath.
She stood before the mirror outside the communal dressing area, turning slowly. The leggings and crop top were black, making her look both athletic and devastatingly glamorous. She ran her hands over her own hips, a slow, appraising gesture.
“It fits,” she said, and her voice held a note of wonder that curdled Elliot’s stomach. It wasn’t just relief. It was approval.
“We look like our own weird parody,” Elliot muttered, adjusting the tank top that felt more like a binding. “We look like we’re trying to be seen.”
“We are seen, Elliot,” Liv said, meeting his eyes in the mirror. Her gaze was clear, sharp from the synthetic chemicals. “We can’t be unseen. So we may as well not look like we’re falling apart.”
She piled their selections at the register. The cashier, a kid with tired eyes, didn’t even glance up at Elliot’s monstrous frame or Liv’s impossible proportions. He just scanned, mumbled a total, and took the cash from the stack of mysterious bills.
They walked back out into the night, now clad in their new skins. Elliot felt exposed, the night air cool on his bare, heavily muscled arms. Liv moved beside him with a new, confident sway, the leggings whispering with each step. They were no longer hiding. They were displaying.
The car was where they left it. As Elliot folded himself behind the wheel, the new shirt stretching across his back, his phone buzzed once on the console.
Not a warning. A new message.
Stabilization confirmed. Maintenance cycle: 72 hours. Acquire sustainable source materials. Continue aesthetic development. The form is a process.
Elliot stared at the words. Liv read them over his shoulder, her long blonde hair brushing his newly massive arm.
“‘Aesthetic development,’” she repeated quietly. Her expression was unreadable. “It doesn’t want us to just stay like this. It wants us to keep going.”
The engine turned over. They pulled out of the parking lot, two impossible people in painted-on clothes, driving toward a dawn that had no place for them. The hunger was asleep. The craving to change, however, had just been given its first taste.