Fox Life

The video playing on repeat stole Iris' breath away. She didn't even register what was happening inside it because of the man's face. It was like looking in a mirror. When an app for face changing had been popular, she had played around with it like everyone else to see how she'd look at fifty or as a man. And now that face was staring back at her through the screen.     

It all led to only one thing, but her mind refused to accept it. Her life had been absent of close family relations, and her aunt looked nothing like her. It made sense if she had inherited it from… from…     

That caged young man was her father, wasn't he?     

"How likely is it that this was left on purpose?" Kyro asked somewhere on the side, his voice cutting through the haze in her mind.     

"Very," the woman he'd called Sophie answered. "We found it to have been preserved alone when everything else was destroyed. Most of it physically so there could be no way of recovering."     

'Staged?' But Iris didn't think that was true. It might have been left to push her to do something, but it wasn't a lie. Based on Aunt Maddie's words, her father had been messed up inside, and the video only showed how it had happened.     

If one was treated as a beast, how could they remain sane? It was a fear Iris had had when she didn't know how to turn back into a human and why she pretended to be a house pet, but it had only been a general worry created from watching too many movies about mutants and people born stronger or different from others in some special way.     

Yet her father seemed to have faced that in reality. She watched once more as he thrashed about, throwing everything he had, himself included, at the iron bars to get out and failed. He was sedated for that and kicked in the ribs.     

"Come with me now," Sophie said in a moment, after a couple quick words into her earpiece. "This was probably planted, but we found something that shouldn't be. It's some old papers that were left in the storage among trash. Nobody seems to have entered that place for at least a year based on the amount of dust."     

"Did you find something more about him?" Iris asked, motioning her hand at the screen.     

Sophie gave her a calculating look, then nodded. "We think so. Can't be certain with them using code names, but he should be under the label fox. Mr. Mosley said that's what we should look for."     

They came to a small, cramped room where a young man of around eighteen was engrossed in flipping through various documents and notebooks. He was doing it so fast Iris had no idea how he managed to understand anything.     

"Kid, show us what you got," Sophie told the youth that was not that much younger than her.     

"Not if you persist with that nickname." But once the young man saw Kyro and Iris, he grabbed a couple documents he'd thrown to the side. "In one box, I found report drafts who some scientist had written by hand and forgotten to throw out. It isn't much, but take a look."     

He presented them with a messy page of barely legible handwriting. It took Iris a good moment to start understanding it. Then her blood ran cold.     

The draft spoke about there being subjects from Fox-3 to Fox-6. All of them were children, the oldest being Fox-3 at six years. He was the healthiest and doing well, but he was alone like that.     

Fox-4 had some skin disease which was probably due to the mutation and would kill him in a year at most. Fox-5 was doing better, but she was really weak for an unknown reason. The scientist kept on doing tests to no avail. Fox-6 was just a newborn, but not meant for the world. He was expected to die within a week.     

Horror gripped Iris at the detached way everything was presented. The kids were treated as things that were to be observed but the loss of which would mean little. It would be annoying, but no more than that.     

"Is there anything else?" she asked in a trembling voice.     

"Not much," the youth answered with a sympathetic look. "There are a few more stacks for me to go through, but this place seems to have been really busy forty years ago. There were all sorts of experiments being done, with subjects hidden under many other animal names."     

Iris nodded, not daring to speak. What was this place? She knew the answer, but it was still hard to believe it. How could anyone do something like that?     

And who were those other foxes? Were they her father's friends? Or worse, his siblings? Whatever the case, if he had to watch all of them die one after another around him… it was no wonder that he might have went mad.     

A hand wrapped around Iris' shoulder, and she looked up into Kyro's brown eyes. "It's going to be alright. They're going to pay for what they've done." There was a certainty in his expression and words that hadn't been there before.     

"Right." Iris nodded, allowing his strength to pull her up.     

Someone had made her father's life hell on Earth, and even if she didn't know him, it was only right for her to repay them for that. It was because of them, after all, that she didn't know what real family was like.     

"Let's go to Tyler's place," she said suddenly.     

Kyro's expression grew taut. "Why?" he asked. "He's done nothing to deserve your trust."     

"Trust?"     

Iris felt no such thing for him. However, he could be a useful source of information if forced to reveal everything he knew. He had lied and evaded when she had no way to push him, but if she came with news that she had destroyed the lab and could make his family's life beyond miserable, he would have to change his tune.     

"I want to know what he knows. Mila has been here, so they're somehow connected to this facility, and I want to find out how. With the people here having run off who knows where, he's the best source we have now."     

There was uncertainty in Kyro's expression, but he nodded. "You sure you want to do that?"     

She wasn't, but it was no longer something she could avoid. Her whole being rose in protest to the idea of using force and intimidation to gain information, but it was the only path left for her. Tyler had been given more than a couple chances to share the truth with her.     

"Yeah," she said with her lip curling up a bit. "It's about time he said something true. And I still need to find out what to do with Mila."