Page 8 of Dose

Silence. Beatrice hums through it, loyal to the last.

“There are indications,” Kessler says finally, “that hostile parties have taken an interest in the facility. Former assets. You’ll receive a briefing packet in transit.”

Former assets. She says it the way you’d say contamination. Somewhere out there are people who used to be like me, people who were grown in terrariums like mine, and they got out, and now they’re a security concern. The pressure behind my sternum eases.

“Understood, Doctor.”

She holds my gaze a beat longer than necessary. I give her nothing. That’s a skill too, older than the humor, older than the rainbow. My face learned to be a locked room before I learned long division.

“Pack light,” she says. “And Summer, Dr. Korte’s methods are more traditional than what you’re accustomed to here. Adapt accordingly.”

She leaves. Her footsteps recede down the east corridor, and I count them without meaning to. Twenty. Not prime. Disappointing.

I stand alone in the lab with Batch 34 and its ninety-eight percent purity and its eleven-second onset, and I think about forty flasks just like it sitting in a stockpile in Ashford, and I think about the word traditional, and I think about children breathing.

Then I stop thinking about it, because that’s the other skill, the load-bearing one, the one holding up everything else.

“Well, Beatrice,” I say, and my voice comes out steadier than I feel, which is its whole job. “Looks like I’m getting out of the terrarium.”

She hums. She’ll miss me. Someone should.

I strip off my gloves, drop them in the biohazard bin, and go to pack a life that fits in one bag. The rainbow will hit my floor tomorrow morning at six forty, and for the first time in eleven years, I won’t be standing in it.

I don’t know why that’s the thought that follows me down the corridor. I don’t know why, when I pass Room 12, I hold my breath a second longer than usual.

I don’t know, yet, that in nine days a man with careful hands and a chemist’s eyes will look at me across a burning facility and see a person where everyone else has only ever seen an instrument.

I just know the knocking has started again.

And this time, I don’t tell it to stop.

4

THEON

Day three, and the benzodiazepine analogue refuses to hold its ring structure above forty degrees Celsius.

I adjust the water bath by half a degree and watch the solution through the glass. Pale amber. It should be clearer than this. I've been losing this compound for three years—reagent grade, buffer strength, the ring structure itself. I've rebuilt every variable I can name, and it still comes apart on me a few degrees too soon. The one thing I never audit is my own hand. Korte was the one who rushed, who trusted a compound to forgive her impatience; I learned the opposite lesson watching her fail. I remember the taste of those failures. Metallic, with a burn at the back of the throat that lingered for days.

Broji unatrag, C-08. Deset. Devet.

Count backward. Ten. Nine. Croatian, because she wanted to know whether the compound degraded language retrieval before motor function or after. I made it to four before my legs stopped answering. She wrote the number down and smiled like I’d given her a gift.

The memory arrives, deposits its data, and leaves. I’ve learned not to fight the arrivals. Fighting costs energy, and I have none to spare this week.

I pull the flask from the bath and label it:

V-SERIES REVERSAL, BATCH 2, INCOMPLETE.

Beside it sit eleven other flasks in various states of progress, each one an answer to a question Korte asked with children’s bodies twenty years ago. The intelligence Marcus pulled from the Ashford procurement records tells me what she’s ordering. Precursors for compliance agents. Dissociative maintenance doses. A cholinergic blocker I recognize because she tested its grandfather on me when I was seven, and I spent three days unable to close my left hand.

Forty-one children in that facility. Some of them have my old dosing schedule running through their veins right now, this minute, while I stand in a warm lab drinking tea that’s gone cold.

I make fresh tea. The ritual matters more than the caffeine.

The door sensor chimes at nine forty. Raphael. I know before the door opens because he’s the only one who waits the full three seconds after the chime, giving me time to cap anything volatile. The others assume my ventilation handles it. Raphael assumes nothing.

“Your sedative,” I tell him, nodding toward the transport case on the end bench. “Twelve doses. Onset in ninety seconds intramuscular, four minutes transdermal. Reversal agent is in the red vials. Don’t confuse them.”