“Bet you’re glad your little subject there isn’t still a caterpillar, huh?”

  Amber looked up and frowned at her lab partner. He was tall and lean and not really anything you’d think of as a scientist. Jim was definitely more the jock type, and Amber could have sworn when they first met he indeed played college football at Syracuse University. She couldn’t remember, though. He looked like he belonged in some alphabet soup government agency, dressed in black pants, a tie, a plain white shirt, and a white lab coat.

  “You’re not funny,” she said with a frown and pulled away from her microscope and reached for the bowl of instant noodles that was her lunch.

  While she was in decent shape, she had never been an athlete. More a girl to sit in the library and ace her studies during school than to do much more. While he dressed prim and proper, like a proper professional, she reasoned that, since she didn’t really deal with many people, jeans and a simple purple top were fine. The white lab coat was pretty mandatory, though, in the workplace, so she did wear that. She was still a scientist after all, and nothing said scientist like a white lab coat.

  Large groups were very much called a ‘no thanks’ in her book, so sitting out on hard bleachers and yelling, ‘Rah! Rah! Rah!’ was very much not for her. Maybe she’d yell ‘Fus Ro Dah,’ but only on certain nights on the weekend. She adjusted the chopstick holding her hair in the bun on her head and looked over to the tablet she had propped up playing replays in the current sumo tournament.

  He grinned and shook his head before he walked over to his own bench. “The sodium in that stuff is going to make your heart jump out of your chest or looking like one of those fat guys you like to watch.”

  Amber frowned and shook her head before she looked back into the microscope and gave a gasp. This thing she had found was amazing and defied logic. It looked like a Morpho Menelaus, or more simply, a simple blue butterfly. The thing about this one, though, was that it glowed. Looking at it under the microscope was like magic.

  The creature wasn’t a solid object. It looked like many, many small glowing dots that were held together by.. Well, Amber didn’t know. She couldn’t even begin to describe it. She also didn’t dare to give it over to someone else. This was the find of a lifetime, and she wanted the credit for it. She just had to figure out what it was, which was the hard part. This thing defied logic.

  She was just walking home one night in a thunderstorm. It was a rather nasty one with lots of weird-looking lightning. She saw the butterfly hiding under an umbrella on a table in front of a restaurant. When Amber went to save the creature from the rain, she realized it wasn’t any sort of butterfly, kept it, and eventually brought it here. She had put the thing under glass so it wouldn’t fly away, and it stayed alive, which only intrigued her more.

  “You know, you probably should tell someone about that thing. Could be all glowy because of radiation or something,” Jim said from his table behind her.

  She pulled away from the microscope once more and turned on her stool. “Well then, it’s a good thing we work in public health, isn’t it? I checked it, and it is not radiated. I can’t figure out why it glows. It’s just so fascinating.”

  Jim nodded his head and shrugged before he bent back down to work on his own project. He was testing water from the public supply or something. There had been a bunch of people who got sick in a lower-income neighborhood in the suburbs, and they had to figure out why.

  The lab they worked in looked pretty much like a high school science classroom. There were half a dozen black-topped tables in the middle of the room. These were the workstations of the people who worked in the Public Health Department of the greater Chicago area. Each workstation had state-of-the-art equipment. If the station didn’t have it and you needed it, it could be found on one countertop that lined the outside of the room.

  “And you know, these guys aren’t fat,” she said plainly and pointed at her tablet where a sumo match was going on.

  Jim looked up from his paperwork to look at it and then at her blankly. “Uh…”

  Amber shook her head and raised a hand. “Okay, they are, but they’re super strong too! They work out for like ten hours a day. It’s subcutaneous fat. You’re a scientist and an athlete. You should know how this works,” she said and shook her head.

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  Jim frowned and shrugged. “I don’t care who you are or how much you work out. That shit aint healthy.” He pointed at her screen just as two very large and very round people clashed with each other.

  Amber simply closed her eyes, shook her head, and returned to her work. She had a small notebook open on her station and was working on sketching how the animal looked under the microscope. It was hard to really get the accents since the butterfly glowed, but she shaded in where she could to make it look as close to the real thing as she could.

  She took a break here and there to eat her noodles, but she only ate about half the container, and the rest sat there, forgotten. The researcher focused on her work. She moved the butterfly upside down and at every angle she could get it under the microscope until she looked up and went to ask Jim a question. She blinked and looked up at the ceiling lights that were mostly off, besides the few that were just over her workstation. The entire lab was empty.

  “Shit,” she muttered and blinked her strained eyes repeatedly. She hadn’t even heard anyone leave or say goodnight or anything. She was too engrossed in her work to pay attention to anyone else.

  She sighed and reached into a drawer before she pulled out her phone. Then she jumped to her feet and grabbed her purse. She had missed a dozen calls from her parents and had forgotten she was supposed to meet them for dinner tonight. Not only that, but she was more than an hour late. Amber rushed to grab the butterfly that was in the little glass container and held it in her hand while she shut off the rest of the equipment.

  She held the butterfly in her hand as she left the lab and looked at it with her naked eyes as she walked through the halls. A quick elevator down to the first floor and then she was outside in another damn thunderstorm. Well, she figured, the perk of being late was that it was past rush hour. She should be able to get a cab easily enough. On her way to the curb to try to hail a cab, she realized she had left her badge on her lab coat, which she had slung over the back of her chair, and cursed herself. It’d cause a problem tomorrow morning, but it was future Amber’s problem.

  She looked up at the sky after a loud crack and another bolt of lightning streaked through the sky. It was weird again, not just a regular bolt of lightning. This lightning was a brilliant blue with a red light that seemed to circle it as it went through the air. The only thing it reminded the girl of was the beams from that movie where they catch ghosts in their proton packs.

  No matter, she couldn’t try to wait it out. The phone in her purse buzzed again, and she pulled out and answered.

  “Yes, Mom, I know I’m way late. Work was wild,” she lied.

  There was a sigh from the other side of the line. “Are you at least on your way yet?”

  “I’m trying to hail a cab now. Once I’m in one, I should be right there.”

  She lifted her hand that was holding onto the dish with the glowing butterfly in it. She hoped the glow would help attract a cabbie to pick her.

  “Alright, well, try to hurry.”

  Amber could hear the disappointment in her mother’s voice, and she sighed. “I will mom, I’ll be there soon. I’m sorry.”

  “Yeah, alright,” her mother said softly before the line disconnected.

  Amber clutched her phone and resisted the urge to throw it into the street. Instead, she put it back in her purse. If she threw it, it’d break, and she’d have to buy a new one, and go down to the store, and that’d be a hassle. Even if she bought it online, she’d have to go and pick it up right away. She needed a phone for her job. Sometimes something would happen, and if she was at the office it was fine, but if it was during her-

  “Hey man, watch it!” she yelled.

  A guy bumped into her and forced his way into the cab that had finally pulled over for her. He was big and was wearing a trench coat and a fedora.

  “You stole my cab!” she shouted and watched it speed away from her. “God dammit.”

  She went to reach into her purse to pull out her phone so she could just order an Uber when she realized she was missing the dish with the butterfly in it. Her eyes went wide, and she patted her pockets of her pants and coat, knowing it wasn’t there, but she had to check, right? Her eyes darted around the dark ground, lit up only by shitty streetlamps, until she found the glass container.

  She rushed to reach down and grab it, and she realized the glowing butterfly wasn’t in it anymore. She went down to grab it, and her eyes searched for the glowing butterfly. Surely it couldn’t fly in the rain, right? This was how she had found it originally, anyway.

  Her eyes darted around until she saw it. The faint blue glow came from under a mail drop box. She almost squealed in delight when she saw it and threw herself to the ground, not caring that she’d show up at the fancy restaurant looking like a drowned cat. This was important.

  She reached underneath and even spoke to the butterfly. She tried to coax it to relax and climb onto her finger. “Come on, little guy, I got you. I won’t let you get hurt,” she said as she even moved the coat to help block the rain when she pulled it out from under the mailbox.

  Amber had just climbed to her feet while she was protecting the butterfly with her coat when it flapped its wings. With it not having done much since the rain, she could easily put the butterfly back in its case. Then she sighed and waved down another cab so she could get going to the dinner she was already late for.

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