Chapter 2: Testing
The park was supposed to be normal.
That was the whole point, Jess reasoned, as she watched a squadron of sparrows dive between the colossal trunks of the oak trees. A dose of boring, uneventful reality to quiet the scheming buzz in their heads before Ellie gave the green light. Jules had practically floated out the door, a woven sunhat perched on her blonde curls, insisting that some sunshine would do them all good.
And for a while, it was.
Alex was sprawled on a checkered blanket, sketching the impossible scale of a dandelion gone to seed, its fluffy head a cloud larger than her torso. Jess pretended to read a medical textbook, her eyes instead tracking the other park-goers. A group of tinies played soccer on a dedicated micro-field, their shouts tinny and distant. A few giantesses strolled the wider paths, their footsteps causing gentle, predictable tremors in the earth.
Jules sat on a bench sized for her, humming. She was watching a line of tiny kindergarteners, no bigger than her thumbnail, being shepherded across a designated crossing by a patient-looking tiny teacher. A familiar, warm smile played on her lips.
“Look at them,” she sighed, her voice a happy rumble. “Just like little ants in their little vests. So organized.”
Then she blinked. A sharp, pained blink. Her smile faltered.
“Ugh. My head.”
Jess looked up. “You okay?”
“Just a… a spike. Like someone drove a nail right behind my eyes.” Jules pressed the heels of her palms to her temples. Her usual vibrant energy seemed to drain from her posture, leaving something slumped and heavy. She was silent for a long minute, the only sound the rustle of leaves and the malfunctioning fountain gurgling its sickly green water nearby.
When she lowered her hands, her expression was different. Blank. The warm, crinkling light around her eyes was gone, replaced by a flat, observational coolness. She looked back at the tiny children, now climbing onto a scaled-down school bus.
“Huh,” Jules said. The tone was all wrong. Detached.
Alex had put her sketchbook down, sensing the shift in the air. “Jules?”
Jules didn’t hear her. Her gaze was locked on the bus. “So cute,” she murmured, but the words held none of her usual doting affection. They were clinical. Hungry. “They look… delicious.”
The blood in Jess’s veins turned to ice. Delicious. The word from CHLOE’s warning echoed in her skull like a struck gong.
“Alex,” Jess whispered, the word sticking in her throat.
Jules moved. It wasn’t her typical, somewhat clumsy grace. It was swift, efficient. She grabbed her large woven purse from the bench and upended it. A phone, a wallet, tubes of lip balm, and a novel the size of a sofa cushion tumbled onto the grass. She shook the empty bag once, then leaned forward, her shadow swallowing the tiny bus stop.
“Jules, no!” Alex screamed, scrambling to her feet.
It was too late. Jules’s fingers, gentle enough to repot seedlings with infinite care, closed around the entire tiny school bus. The metallic crunch was a sickening, high-pitched scream. Tiny, panicked cries erupted from within as she lifted it, peering through the windows with a fascinated curiosity. She didn’t shake it. She just tilted it, as if emptying a candy box, over the gaping maw of her purse.
A stream of brightly-colored specks—children, teacher, all of them—rained down into the dark fabric depths. Their screams were muffled, then silent, as the bus followed, landing with a soft thump.
“New friends,” Jules announced, a placid smile on her face. She cinched the purse’s drawstring closed, ignoring the faint, frantic bulging from within. She then scanned the park, her head moving with a predator’s smooth precision. Her eyes landed on a pair of tiny joggers on a path near her feet.
Before Jess could even process a thought, Jules’s hand swooped down. The joggers vanished, plucked from the ground and deposited into the purse with a casual, indifferent flick of her thumb.
“Got to catch them all,” Jules sang softly, a twisted parody of a childhood rhyme.
“The device,” Alex hissed, grabbing Jess’s arm, her fingers vise-tight. “It’s here. It’s active. We have to find the source!”
“We have to get out of here!” Jess shot back, her body vibrating with terror. Every instinct screamed to run, to hide, to become invisible.
“If we don’t stop it, this happens everywhere!” Alex’s eyes were wide, but not with fear. With a horrifying, focused clarity. “Look at her! That’s not Jules! We need to find the emitter!”
Jules’s head turned. The movement was slow, inevitable. Her flat, curious eyes found them. The last two tinies on her personal radar.
“Oh,” she said, her voice dripping with a false, sweet recognition. “My babies.”
She stood up. The world recalibrated. The bench was a tiny thing behind her. The oak trees framed her like columns in a terrible temple. She took one step towards them, the impact jolting through the ground, kicking up a cloud of grass and soil.
“Come to momma,” she cooed, her hand descending. It wasn’t the swift, precise grab she’d used on the strangers. This was a slow, sweeping net, fingers spread wide, aiming to scoop them up together.
They ran. Not away in a straight line, but towards the rusted swing set and the gurgling fountain, using the larger park furniture for meager cover. Jules’s hand slammed into the earth where they’d been standing, leaving a five-fingered crater in the turf.
“Playing hard to get!” Jules laughed, the sound booming and wrong. She brought her hand to her face, peered at the dirt on her fingertips, then licked it clean with a tongue as broad as a welcome mat. “Tasty.”
Jess’s lungs burned. Adrenaline made the world too sharp, too slow. She could see every blade of crushed grass, every pebble. She could see Alex darting towards the fountain, not away from the giantess, but along a diagonal path that put the fountain between them and Jules.
“The water’s poisoned!” Jess screamed after her, remembering the reports Sabine Cross had been linked to. “Alex, don’t!”
But Alex was already there, skidding to a halt by the fountain’s concrete base. She wasn’t looking at the green water. She was looking at the fountain’s machinery access panel, rusted and slightly ajar. And at the half-buried metal crate beneath the swings.
Jules rounded the fountain, her purse swinging from her wrist. Her shadow fell over Alex, plunging her into cold twilight. “Found you.”
“The crate!” Alex yelled, pointing frantically. “Jess, the signals! It has to be broadcasting from a localized point! That crate!”
Understanding crashed into Jess’s terror. The device wasn’t city-wide yet. It was a test. A targeted, localized field. And they were in the middle of it. Sabine. This had her fingerprints all over it—a public atrocity to be blamed on a giantess, stoking the war she wanted.
Jules’s fingers curled, preparing to pluck Alex like a daisy.
Jess didn’t think. She ran, not away, but directly at Jules’s approaching sandaled foot. She scooped up a fallen, hefty oak branch, as thick as her own thigh, and with a strength she didn’t know she had, she jammed it straight up, into the soft arch of Jules’s descending foot.
It was like poking a mountain. But it was a surprise.
Jules flinched, a mere tremor for her, a seismic shift for them. Her foot lifted slightly, diverted. “Naughty,” she chided, looking down at Jess with mild annoyance. She changed target, her thumb and forefinger coming down like a falling girder to snip Jess from the ground.
A spray of foul, green water hit Jules square in the eye.
She recoiled with a gasp, blinking rapidly. Alex stood by the fountain, holding a broken piece of piping, water dripping from the end. “Hey! Over here!”
It bought seconds. Jess scrambled towards the metal crate. It was wedged deep under the swing set’s foundation. She clawed at the dirt, her nails breaking. It was sealed, but there was a vent grille. And through it, she could see the soft, pulsating glow of electronics, and hear a high-frequency whine that grated on the edge of hearing.
“Smash it!” Alex shouted, dodging another slow, playful swipe from Jules, who was now wiping her eye and laughing. “Jess, you have to!”
Jess looked around for a rock, a tool, anything. There was nothing. Just dirt, grass, and the immense, terrifying form of her mother, who now looked at her with a head-tilted, acquisitive glee.
“My serious one,” Jules murmured, leaning down. Her breath was a warm, organic hurricane. “You’ll be so quiet in my pocket.”
A shadow fell over them both, different from Jules’s. Sharper, colder. A sleek, black high-heeled shoe, polished to a military gloss, came down and stamped on the metal crate.
The crunch of shearing metal was deafening. The pulsating light inside died instantly. The high-frequency whine cut off, leaving a ringing silence.
Jules froze, halfway to grabbing Jess. She blinked. Once, twice. The flat, hungry light in her eyes flickered, dissolved, and was replaced by swirling, profound confusion. Then horror. She looked at her outstretched hand, at Jess cowering below it, at the purse bulging and moving at her wrist. Her face crumpled.
She snatched her hand back as if burned, clasping it to her chest. A raw, wounded sound escaped her.
The owner of the black shoe lifted her foot. From the shattered crate, wires and cracked components smoked faintly. Standing beside it, tall and impassive in a tailored grey suit, was a giantess Jess had never seen before. She had severe auburn hair pulled into a tight knot, and eyes the colour of polished steel. She held a tablet, her thumb swiping across it dismissively.
“Signal terminated. Source confirmed as Sabine Cross’s signature compact emitter. A bit crude, but effective for a limited radius.” Her voice was dry, devoid of inflection.
Jules was sobbing, fumbling with the drawstring of her purse with trembling, clumsy fingers. “Oh god, oh god, what did I do?”
The new giantess, Sloane Merrick, watched Jules vomit onto the grass, her expression one of distant, analytical pity. She then looked down, her gaze passing over Jess and then settling on Alex, who stood frozen by the poisoned fountain.
“You must be Alex,” Sloane said. She didn’t smile. “Ellie’s daughter. Your mother said you’d be in the middle of it.” Her eyes flicked to the destruction. “She wasn’t wrong.”
Jules fumbled with the knotted drawstring, her breaths coming in ragged, wet sobs that vibrated through the air. “I’m so sorry, I’m so sorry, please, I didn’t mean—” The knot gave way. With infinite, shaking care, she upturned the purse over a soft patch of clover, her other hand poised as a trembling backstop.
The tiny school bus tumbled out first, its roof dented. Then a cascade of twenty-three tiny people spilled after it, a tangle of limbs and tiny screams. They scattered instantly, a burst of panic across the grass, putting as much distance as they could between themselves and the weeping giantess. The two joggers helped the kindergarten teacher to her feet.
Jules lowered herself until her face was level with the ground, her tears creating muddy patches in the soil. She didn’t move, didn’t reach. She just pressed her forehead to the earth, a gesture of absolute submission. “Please forgive me,” she whispered, the sound a broken hum. “I wasn’t myself. Something was in my head. It made me see you as… as things. And I’m so, so ashamed.”
The tinies huddled, their fear palpable. The teacher, a woman with sharp glasses, stared up at the colossal, distraught face, her own expression shifting from terror to bewildered caution.
“A peace offering,” Jules wept, fumbling in the pocket of her sundress. She pulled out a massive, foil-wrapped bar of chocolate, the kind sold at giantess concession stands. With meticulous precision, she broke off two tiny squares, each still the size of a sofa cushion to the park tinies. She placed them gently on the grass, a respectful distance away. “It’s Belgian. It’s very good. I… I understand if you never want to see me again.”
Sloane Merrick watched the transaction, her tablet now tucked under her arm. “Sentiment rarely fixes structural damage,” she remarked, her tone neither cruel nor kind. It was a statement of fact.
“Shut up,” Alex spat, glaring up at the new giantess before running to her mother’s cheek, placing a hand on the warm, tear-slick skin. “It’s okay, Jules. They’re safe. You stopped.”
“Because she stopped it,” Jess said, her voice hollow as she looked at the shattered crate. She hugged herself, the adrenaline crash making her knees feel weak. “If that signal had been stronger, or wider…”
“It would have been a city-wide dinner bell,” Sloane finished, crouching down. Her steel-grey eyes assessed them both. “Sabine Cross is escalating. This emitter was a field test. The next iteration won’t have such a convenient off-switch.” She glanced at Jules. “Your mother employed me as a consultant on secure infrastructure. I specialized in counter-signature detection. When Ellie heard CHLOE’s report, she tasked me with scanning for prototype emissions. I traced this one here. A bit late, it seems.”
“You knew?” Jess’s voice cracked. “You knew this might happen and you just… watched?”
“I arrived as the signal peaked. Empirical observation was necessary to confirm the source and its effects.” Sloane stood, brushing invisible dust from her suit. “My apologies for the traumatic methodology. The data is now conclusive.”
Jules slowly sat up, the chocolate squares untouched on the grass. The released tinies were already being escorted away by a tiny municipal response team that had arrived on a utility vehicle. The look they cast back at Jules was pure, unadulterated terror. It shattered her all over again.
“We have to go home. Right now.” Alex’s mind was already racing past the crisis to the next step. “Ellie needs to know it’s operational. Not a theory. It works.”
Jules nodded, fresh tears welling. She carefully, so carefully, cupped her hands on the ground. “Please. Let me take you home. I need to… I need to tell Ellie what I did.”
Jess wanted to refuse. Every fiber in her body screamed against getting back into a giantess’s grasp. But the image of a city full of giantesses with blank, hungry eyes was worse. She stepped into the vast, warm palm, Alex following.
“The device is built,” Jess said, her voice trembling with a fury that pushed out the fear. “It’s operational. And Sabine is broadcasting.”
Sloane watched as Jules lifted them to her chest, holding them with a fragility that spoke of shattered self-trust. “I’ll secure the site and forward the emitter’s schematics to Ellie’s home server,” Sloane said. “They’re amateurish. But amateurs with nothing to lose are the most dangerous kind.”
Jules didn’t wait. She turned, a new urgency in her movements, and began a careful, rapid stride towards the park’s edge, each step a conscious effort to be smooth. The wind whipped at Alex’s hair as they were cradled against the frantic beat of Jules’s heart.
“She’s going to be so disappointed in me,” Jules whispered, the words vibrating through her ribs.
“She’s going to be terrified for you,” Alex corrected, shouting over the wind. “For all of us. Focus on that. Get us there.”
Jules nodded, her jaw set. She broke into a run, a ground-eating lope that made the world blur, the streets becoming a stream of color and noise below. They were heading home, carrying the worst possible news. The proof was in Jules’s tear-streaked face and the ghost of a hunger that hadn’t been her own. The war CHLOE warned them about had just moved from the shadows into the bright, terrifying light of a park afternoon.
The journey home was a shaking, wind-whipped blur of blurred rooftops and Jules’s silent, shuddering breaths. She held them against her sternum, her fingers a loose but desperate cage, as if afraid she might drop them or crush them without meaning to. Every few blocks, a wet, ragged sob would escape her, making her whole frame tremble.
“Almost there,” Alex murmured, her voice nearly lost in the thunder of Jules’s heartbeat. She kept a hand flat against the warm skin, feeling the frantic rhythm. Jess said nothing. She sat stiffly in the center of the palm, arms wrapped around her knees, staring at nothing.
The familiar suburban sprawl of their neighborhood came into view, the houses built to a mixed scale. Their own home was a masterpiece of Ellie’s design: a giantess-sized structure with intricate, integrated tiny pathways and elevators built into the architecture. Jules landed in the backyard with a soft thud that bent the grass, her movements suddenly cautious and small.
She didn’t set them down on their patio. She knelt, bringing her cupped hands down to the giant sliding glass door that led to the kitchen, her face a mess of tears and smudged mascara. Through the door, they could see Ellie’s form moving at the kitchen island, a blueprint rolled out before her.
Ellie looked up, her sharp features initially softening at the sight of her family. Then she saw Jules’s expression. The blueprint was forgotten.
The door slid open with a whisper. Ellie’s concerned face filled the space. “Jules? What’s wrong? What happened?” Her eyes darted to the girls in Jules’s hands, checking for immediate injury.
Jules tried to speak. A choked, guttural sound came out. She simply opened her hands, letting Alex and Jess step onto the polished concrete floor of the kitchen. The scale of the room was suddenly, overwhelmingly immense. The island loomed like a cliff face. Ellie crouched down, her long dark hair swinging forward as she brought her gaze to their level.
“Alexandra? Jessica? Explain.”
“The device,” Alex blurted, her words tumbling over each other. “The one CHLOE warned us about. It’s real. Someone activated it at the park. A localized field.”
Ellie’s brow furrowed. “A field test. Were you exposed? Are you hurt?”
“We’re fine,” Jess said, but her voice was thin and cracked on the last word. She wrapped her arms tighter around herself. “We weren’t the target.”
Ellie’s dark eyes flicked back to Jules, who was still kneeling on the grass, her shoulders heaving. A dreadful understanding began to dawn. “Jules. Look at me.”
Jules forced her head up. The raw agony in her blue eyes was unbearable. “It got into my head, Ellie,” she whispered, the words husky and broken. “It was like… a switch. Everything went quiet. Then everything tiny just looked… delicious.”
The word hung in the air, vile and heavy.
Ellie went very, very still. “What did you do.” It wasn’t a question.
“I took them.” Jules’s confession was a flood now, each sentence a gasp. “A whole tiny school bus. Just… dumped them in my purse. I grabbed joggers. I was going to keep them. I said I was going to keep them.” She was trembling violently. “And then I saw our girls. My babies. And I wanted to pick them up too. To put them in my pocket with the others.”
She sucked in a hitched breath, her gaze locking on Jess with pure, unadulterated horror.
“I almost ate Jess.”
The silence that followed was absolute. The hum of the giant refrigerator sounded like a distant storm. Ellie’s face didn’t change, but the color drained from it, leaving her skin pale and taut. Her knuckles, where she rested a hand on the floor, turned white.
“The hunger was so loud, Ellie,” Jules wept, pressing her forehead against the doorframe. “It wasn’t me. It was this… this noise in my mind telling me they were just little snacks, that it would be easy, that it would feel good. And for a second, I believed it.”
Ellie stood. The movement was slow, controlled, a massive tectonic shift of grief and fury. She looked down at her partner of decades, this playful, gentle woman reduced to a sobbing wreck on the lawn. Then she looked at her tiny daughters, who had just escaped becoming a whim of their own mother’s hijacked appetite.
Her voice, when it came, was low. It was not the stern, doting tone they knew. It was the sound of frozen steel cracking.
“Who.”
“Sabine Cross,” Alex said quickly. “Sloane Merrick was there. She crushed the emitter. She confirmed the signature.”
“Sloane,” Ellie repeated, the name a blade. She gave a single, sharp nod. Her mind was already moving past the shock, into logistics, into retaliation. “She’s the best. If she confirms it, it’s definitive.”
Jules lunged forward, gripping the edge of the doorframe. Her tears were gone, replaced by a blazing, desperate fury that mirrored Ellie’s but was fueled by shame. “Find them, Ellie. You have to find whoever built that thing. You have to find Sabine.”
She looked up, her eyes swimming again, but now with a fierce, terrifying light.
“Find them so I can annihilate them.”
It wasn’t a metaphor. They all heard it. The playful giantess who gardened and posed for sketches was gone. In her place was something primal, a force of vengeance made flesh, speaking through her tears.
Ellie held her gaze for a long moment. Then she turned her head, looking towards her study, where her servers and design terminals glowed. “I will,” she said, the promise final and absolute. “They reached into my family’s mind and twisted it. They made you a weapon against your own heart.”
She looked back at Jules, her expression softening by a fraction, a sliver of the shared pain visible. “They don’t get to walk away from that.”
The directive was set. The mission was no longer theoretical prevention. It was personal. It was a hunt. And Jules’s raw, shuddering vow hung in the air, a new and volatile element in the war that had just walked through their kitchen door.