Page 15 of Dose

I know the compound intimately—not because I designed it, but because I took it from ages seven through eleven. I can still summon the texture of those years if I’m foolish enough to try: days smeared together, faces without edges, my own hands at the ends of my arms like borrowed equipment.

I log the batch number and run the purity assay. Ninety-nine point two percent.

“Excellent work, whoever made you,” I tell the vial. “You’re a triumph. I hope your creator steps on glass every morning for the rest of their life.”

Vladimir hums. He agrees with me about everything, which is why he’s my second-favorite colleague. First place belongs to the corridor window.

The window is on the first sublevel, at the top of the stairwell I use to deliver my daily reports, and it shouldn’t exist. Someone made an architectural error forty years ago, back when this building actually studied soil, and left a slit of glass near the ceiling where the stairwell meets ground level. It’s maybe thirty centimeters wide, reinforced and filthy, but at eleven forty each morning, if the sky cooperates, it lets in a blade of sunlight that lands on the seventh stair.

I’ve started timing my report deliveries for eleven forty.

This is not rebellion. I want to be clear about that, in case the part of my brain that files reports on the rest of me is listening. Standing in sunlight for thirty seconds is thermoregulation. Vitamin D synthesis. A specialist maintaining optimal function.

It’s mine, is what it is. Like the rainbow was mine. I’m assembling a very small museum of things that belong to me, and the whole collection fits inside a patch of light on a stair.

Today, the sky cooperates. I stand on the seventh stair with Korte’s interim report under my arm, close my eyes, and count to thirty by primes: two, three, five, seven, eleven, thirteen, seventeen, nineteen, twenty-three, twenty-nine. Sunlight warms my face without asking what I do for a living.

Then I climb the rest of the stairs and go back to work, because the sun forgives everyone. That’s its whole flaw as a system.

The children move through this building like weather. I don’t see them often, but I register their effects.

Between fourteen hundred and fifteen hundred, muted voices travel through the ventilation shaft above cabinet nine. The words are too blurred to catch, but the cadence is unmistakable: call and response, small voices repeating something in unison until they get it right. In the evenings, I hear soft-soled footsteps overhead—forty-one pairs of shoes designed to make no sound, which means I hear them everywhere.

On day four, I saw one of the children up close.

I was delivering the stockpile verification to Korte’s office when a handler came down the east corridor, steering a girl by the shoulder. She was nine, maybe ten, and fresh from a session. Her face had the blankness that comes afterward, everything pulled inward and out of reach.

I know that look. I learned it in another facility, in another decade. Give children the same predators, and they learn the same stillness.

She didn’t look at me. She’s not allowed to look at anyone. But as they passed, her hand twitched at her side, fingers spreading and closing, and I recognized what she was doing. She was counting her steps, using the one measure still available to her.

I wanted to tell her, Hello. I see you. I have a centrifuge named Beatrice and a window that makes rainbows, and someday you’ll build a museum too.

I said none of it.

I delivered my report, and Korte was pleased. Korte is always pleased with me.

I don’t know what to do with that.

On day eight, Korte comes down to review the chromatography results herself.

“Your predecessor,” she says, studying them with an attention that borders on affection, “would have taken three weeks to accomplish this. You’ve restructured the entire verification framework in eight days.”

“The original framework had redundancies. I removed them.”

“You did more than that.” She sets the tablet down and looks at me over the steel frames. We’re in my lab, and she’s holding a cup of tea she brought with her because she doesn’t consume anything prepared below ground level. Even her thirst has security protocols. “The new inventory seals. The dual-log access system. The tracer dilutions in the reserve stocks. If anyone touches this stockpile now, we’ll know within four hours which cabinet, which compound, which glove size.”

“That was the assignment, Doctor.”

“It was. And you’ve done it beautifully.” She sips her tea. “Do you know what C-08 will find if he comes? A locked house. Every window wired. Every door alarmed. You’ve built me a fortress, Summer.”

I’ve built her a fortress. Inside it, forty-one children take my compounds with their morning rations. The better I am at my work, the harder those walls become to breach. That’s the joke at the center of everything: the program made me excellent, and my excellence protects it.

“The subjects benefit as well,” Korte adds, in the tone of a woman remembering to mention the weather. “Verified purity means predictable dosing. Predictable dosing means fewer adverse events during behavioral installation. You’ve improved their welfare, in a sense.”

The pressure behind my sternum pounds hard enough to hurt. My face doesn’t move.

“In a sense,” I agree.