Beau returned to pick up Tessa then retraced his route back to the dead giant’s bedroom. As they entered the master bedroom, Tessa sat beside him, quiet but alert.

  “You’re right,” she said. “I definitely wanted to see this.”

  They rolled in slowly. The bed loomed overhead like a mountain of linen and memory foam. The air felt wrong—not stale, exactly, but still as though it had been waiting for them to return.

  Then she saw the giant’s skeleton sitting on the floor, back against the bed.

  “Oh my God,” she muttered. “Do you know what this means?”

  “What are you thinking?”

  “Look at the size of it, Beau. Now look at the size of us.”

  “Yeah, I had the same conclusion. My mind kind of broke thinking about it. That’s why I came back to get you.”

  The giant’s skeleton lay reclined against the base of the bed frame, knees half-folded, arms slumped at his sides. Compared to them, he was a giant. His clothes had disintegrated to threads, but the bones still rested in a disturbingly human posture. There was something personal about the way he died. It was like he sat down, exhausted, and just chose to let go without a struggle.

  Tessa slid out of the truck first. She approached the skeleton. Then she stopped. She crouched low near the giant’s outstretched skeletal hand. She didn’t say anything, but her eyebrow arched like she was thinking about something.

  “What is it?” Beau asked.

  “Look.” She pointed. A golden band shimmered beneath the edge of a nightstand, partially concealed by dusty webs. They hopped into the truck and drove closer. Beau angled the headlights so it shone on the golden metal. The light bounced off the ring, big as a trampoline, which revealed two letters etched inside.

  “R.G.,” Beau said, reading the letters.

  “Randall Gerben,” Tessa said.

  Beau and Tessa exchanged worried looks. Silence stretched between them.

  It’s definitely him,” Tessa said, “This is the guy who built our dome.”

  Beau swallowed. “The man who started it all.”

  They hopped back into the truck and drove a big loop around the bedroom, searching everything they could easily access. Piles of documents surrounded the room. They found tons of faded notebooks, torn printouts, sheets of paper scrawled with years of ideas. They waded through them carefully and scanned whatever pages they could read or understand. Some documents were written in Mandarin. Others were written in Russian. Some of the manilla folders were stamped with CIA and TOP SECRET. There were doodles of molecular chains and references to something called neural simulations. None of it made immediate sense and intrigued Tessa more than Beau.

  Tessa spotted something. “Look, there’s his phone.” It was laying face-up near the bed leg. She tapped the screen with her boot. The screen was dead. But the charger—the tip—lay on the floor, its cord thick as a tree trunk. The cable was still attached to the receptacle in the wall.

  “We can use the truck winch,” Beau said, already moving.

  They wrapped the winch line around the charging port and slowly dragged it toward the phone. Tessa held onto the cable with her hand like it was a fire hose while Beau backed up the truck; together, they guided the charging tip into the phone. The device snapped in place.

  The screen remained black.

  “Guess it’s dead,” Tessa said.

  Then the screen glowed white. It displayed a lock screen. It asked for a four-digit passcode.

  “There’s no chance we guess the code before we’re locked out,” Tessa muttered.

  She examined the phone case. “Help me with this, Beau.”

  Beau retrieved his axe from the truck. He slid the edge of it between the phone and the case. He carefully pulled on the axe handle and applied leverage, inch by inch.

  “Careful!” snapped Tessa.

  Beau stopped.

  “Okay. Keep going. Slower this time.”

  Beau pulled a tiny bit more.

  “Okay, hold it.”

  Tessa unsheathed her own axe. She wedged her blade in and then slid it carefully, prying open the case inch by inch. After about five minutes of this careful operation, the phone popped free from the case. Tessa held her axe and kept the phone pried open. “I can’t hold this forever! Do you see anything?”

  Through the gap, Beau saw something white and flat. He grabbed it and pulled it out. It felt like a heavy canvas. After pulling it free, he dropped it on the floor. Tessa pulled her ax free. The phone dropped and snapped back into the phone case.

  The tale has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the violation.

  “Hah,” Tessa said. “Old people are all the same.”

  “Rufus does the same thing,” Beau said. “Incredible. Whether they are giants or not, I guess we’re all just people.”

  The scrap of paper had a code: 4321

  Tessa swiped her palm across the phone screen. She typed in the password. “We’re in! That’s one problem solved.” She craned her neck and looked up at the corner of the still-functional laptop sitting way up on the table. “Now we just have to find a way to get up there and check the files on his computer.”

  “What about the files on the phone?”

  “My mom can bring the tech guys and extract all the data. We don’t have time to sort through it all now.”

  “Good point. Let’s see what’s on the table.”

  The operation of climbing up onto the little wooden table presented its own unique challenge. Beau knew they had to come up with a creative solution. At their size, the table was a couple hundred feet tall and ornately carved from wood, which meant there were grooves up and down the legs and spine.

  Tessa was the one who spotted the torn sock draped beneath Dr. Gerben’s nightstand. Its fibers were soft and fraying.

  “Perfect for weaving a rope,” Beau said.

  Together, they meticulously knotted lengths of cotton strands into a narrow rope ladder. They threaded it with a few stiff plastic bristles from a nearby hairbrush. They attached them as cross-rungs to keep it from twisting. Beau tested its weight, gave a nod, then bundled it.

  The table wasn’t all wood, it had been partially constructed of iron strands. These strands wove up into the table top and formed decorative geometric shapes that left holes perfect for climbing. The grooves in the iron gave them stable footing. They climbed to the stop and soon wedged themselves up through the gaps around the edge of the table.

  Having reached the top of the table. Beau and Tessa each took their bundles of rope ladder, attached them together, tied them to the iron detailing on the edge of the table, and dropped it off the edge. It draped all the way to the floor.

  “Good,” she said. “We have a way back down.” Then she turned to the laptop and her face soured. “What’s wrong with it? Did it lock up?”

  The laptop’s screen was black, no longer displaying the code as it once did.

  “Let’s wake it up,” Beau said.

  Together, they jumped on the keyboard.

  The screen unlocked, but requested a password. So they typed in ‘4321.’

  The screen flickered on and displayed the desktop screen. In order to navigate the computer, Beau operated the mouse pad while Tessa ran from key to key. They checked some of the files, images, and emails available to them. They found journal entries. There were video logs. There was tons of research on a company called Tiny Pharmaceuticals. Dr. Gerben’s entire life and what must have been most of his research was made digital for them to explore.

  Dr. Randall Gerben. CEO of Tiny Pharmaceuticals. Former widower. A man obsessed with legacy, control, and healing a wound that nothing in the world could mend. After his wife died, something broke him. He withdrew from public life, poured billions into synthetic biology, and began Project Adam. Turns out, he wasn’t trying to save humanity. He was trying to fill his mansion with a family of people that he created called Tinylings. He never once referred to them as humans even though everything about them seemed identical except for their size.

  “We’re not human?” Beau asked.

  Tessa just shook her head, no. She didn’t understand, either.

  “We were created in a lab, Tessa.”

  Her lips parted, but she didn’t speak. Her eyes remained on the screen.

  One email caught her attention: subject line, “Paradise Dome 101 Timeline”

  They opened it.

  The document revealed a timeline which had information that proved Dome 101 had only been activated two years ago. For every single resident inside Dome 101, there was a character profile. There was all the general information like their height, weight, and other physical details, but the thing that really stood out was the age of everyone inside the dome. Everyone had two different ages. Their profiles displayed a manufactured age, which was different for everyone. For Beau and Tessa, it was eighteen years old. For Rufus it was seventy-seven years old. But there was also an “actual age” which was the same for everyone: Two years old. That piece of information confused them so they searched the files more deeply. They found lab tests. They found tons of back and forth communications between Dr. Gerben and investors. All of the information pointed to the same thing, a single truth.

  Everyone inside Paradise Dome 101 had been synthetically created and inserted into the dome at the same time. They didn’t live a life before the dome like they had been led to believe. Their memories and experiences, two years ago, had all been implanted months prior in the creation stage. Anything they remembered happening two years or before was fictional, fabricated. That time Beau went to summer camp when he was twelve? Never happened. The first girl he kissed in sixth grade? Laura never existed. Neither did his middle school for that matter. His gut clenched. Not even his parents had existed, which meant neither did their car crash.

  Tessa sat down on the enter key. Her face went blank. The computer chirped at them, so she moved off the key and sat beside Beau.

  “The only family that’s real…is the one we have inside the dome,” she said.

  Beau nodded. “My mother. My father. They never existed. The only person I have is Rufus. And can I even consider him a blood relative? What does that even mean for a Tinyling?”

  She looked up at him.

  “I don’t know what it means…but you’ll always have me,” she said.

  Beau wrapped his arm around his friend and squeezed his friend tightly. “And you will always have me, Tessa. This entire time, all we’ve ever had is each other.”

  “My dad…” she said. “He…he was never real.”

  They sat there in silence. They weren’t broken. But they were forever changed.

  Beau stood. His eyes darted to the nearby dresser. From their height on the table top, he spotted one of the drawers that hung open. He could see down into its colorful contents—stacks of sealed candy bars, chip bags, fruit cups, protein bars, dried fruit, an entire cache of snack foods.

  Beau turned to her, eyes lit with sudden clarity.

  “Tessa. Look.”

  Her eyes widened when she realized what he was staring at. “Food!”

  Beau grinned. “We’re going to need a convoy.”

  “So much FOOD!” she squealed. She looked back at him. She flashed a huge smile. “Giant snickers bars?! What the heck?!”

  With extreme caution, they descended down the rope ladder, loaded back into the truck, and sped back to Dome 101 to inform them of their incredible discovery—but also the solemn truth that they were not humans but a species called Tinylings.