The little brown puck, its crisp edges glistening with sizzling fat, was the filthiest thing in the hard-scrubbed, white-walled room. Incongruously, the place stunk of both chlorine bleach and diner-grade grease runoff at the exact same time. Ellen felt a brief frisson of cognitive dissonance.

"Well," said Louis, running his fingers through his shaggy mop of salt-and-pepper hair. "There we have it."

"It should be a delicious medium-rare at this point," Ellen said. "Normally, it's not wise to venture any lower than medium-well, but..."

"If there's even a speck of [i]E. coli[/i] in there, food poisoning'll be the least of our worries."

Ellen nodded. "So," she said, "you want to be the one to try a $300,000 hamburger?"

"We've been over this. I'm in this game to reduce the wholesale slaughter of animals on a global basis. It's not something I'm going to partake of myself."

And here came the full-on mad science moment. Ellen took a deep breath. "That's the beauty of this sample, Louis. It's all perfectly ethical."

Louis shook his head. "I know lab-grown meat doesn't involve slaughter or suffering, but it's still not perfect. The animals we're taking cultures from didn't ask for this. I know it doesn't hurt them, per se, but they still can't give consent."

"And I'm telling you, the animal these specific cells were taken from can absolutely give you her consent."

Comprehension dawned across Louis's face; Ellen smiled in what she hoped was a non-creepy way.

"Oh, no."

"Oh, yes," Ellen replied.

"This—this is a mistake," Louis stammered.

"Yes. I admit it. It's a horrible, ghoulish perversion of science. It'll all be worth it to see Mr. Iron Self-Control get to enjoy a goddamn hamburger for once in his life." She cleared her throat. "Louis, I hereby give you full permission to eat me-meat, with full knowledge of all that this entails."

"That's just it! You don't have any such thing!" Louis threw himself down upon a lab stool.

Ellen sighed. "All right, all right. Super-weird of me. I know. It was just a proof-of-concept anyway. What else were we going to do with it?"

Louis did not respond. Ellen's fellow researcher huddled himself in his lab coat as though wishing it would swallow him whole.

"I'm sorry," she said. "Listen. Let me make it up to you. Come out to the house. Drinks are on me tonight. It looks like it's going to be a lovely evening. The moon on the lake is just sublime."

"Can't," Louis stammered, not looking up. "Working late."

The clock on the wall of the lab ticked a few times in the silence. Eventually, Ellen sighed. "Sorry for being so weird," she said.

Louis wordlessly waved Ellen off, his back completely turned. She gathered up her tablet and headed for the employee lockers, sparing one last look over her shoulder at him.

[i]He's so still,[/i] she thought.

[HR]

The howling was getting closer. Closer, every second. Somewhere far away, as through deep water, she could hear the 9-1-1 dispatcher asking with increasing insistence for her to describe the nature of the emergency.

The lake house was isolated. That had been the whole point. It had seemed like a lovely idea at the time, a little hideaway far from the sirens of the city. Far from ambulances, far from the police.

It was on her porch now. She could hear the thing's claws clattering against the wooden boards. With a great crash, the creature's powerful shoulder splintered the front door, knocking it inward and letting in a rush of cold night air. There, silhouetted in the moonlight, was a massive, red-eyed beast with slavering jaws and a distinctive shaggy pelt of salt-and-pepper fur.

"You know the beauty of this," snarled the wolf, in a twisted-up version of Louis's voice, "is that it's all perfectly ethical."

It leapt.