Page 16 of Dose

I imagine picking up the flask of D-40 concentrate on the bench between us and throwing it in her face. I imagine contaminating every cabinet with something slow and subtle. I could design the compound, vector, and timeline in under a minute. I’ve already designed eleven versions. I know because I counted.

Still, I keep measuring. I keep saying, “Understood, Doctor,” and all eleven sabotages remain imaginary. Conditioning isn’t a cage I can point to. It’s the floor under my feet, and I don’t know how to stand without it.

“Final report tomorrow morning,” Korte says, collecting her tea. “Then I imagine Kessler will want you back. Unless.” She pauses at the door. “I’ve considered requesting a permanent transfer. Your profile suits this facility.”

The door seals behind her before I have to answer, which is the closest thing to mercy she’s ever shown anyone.

The audit isn’t the only inventory I’ve been keeping.

The guard on the sublevel night rotation is named Pavel, according to his badge, and he is merely indifferent, which in this place qualifies him for sainthood. The day guard, Yeronin, is not indifferent. On day five, I watched him stop a boy in the corridor and make him stand facing the wall for eleven minutes because he was walking too slowly. Yeronin smiled the whole time. I added him to a list I’m keeping in my head.

I don’t know what the list is for. It’s just a list: cruel guards, indifferent guards, camera positions, which stairwell doors require a badge in both directions and which only require one, the fire-suppression layout, the ventilation trunk routes, and the fact that the dormitory wing’s air handling connects to the east stack. The east stack’s maintenance hatch has a broken sensor no one has logged.

An auditor audits. I’ve simply audited more of the building than the assignment required. If anyone asks, thoroughness is in my profile. It’s why I was requested by name.

I’m not planning anything. I’m observing. Observing is what I’m for.

But I observe like a woman memorizing a house she may someday need to escape from—or burn—and I’ve stopped pretending I don’t know the difference.

The night before I present my final report, I can’t sleep.

My quarters on the sublevel are a gray box with a bed, a desk, and no window, not even a slit left by architectural error. I lie on top of the blanket, fully dressed because undressing in this building feels like a concession, and go through the documentation once more on the tablet balanced against my knees.

It’s perfect. Of course it is. Two hundred and six pages of verified purity, hardened protocols, and access alarms. Every compound accounted for. Every synthesis route optimized. Tomorrow, I hand Korte her fortress. After that, I may fly back to the Terrarium, where the rainbow will hit my floor at six forty and I’ll stand in it while forty-one children continue taking my chemistry with breakfast in a building I made stronger.

I set the tablet down. The ceiling has one hundred and forty-four panels. Twelve squared. I’ve counted them every night for eight nights, hoping the math will do what it has always done for me and fill the space where feelings would otherwise go.

Tonight, the math doesn’t hold.

The feeling behind my sternum knocks slowly and steadily. For nine days, since Kessler said the word Ashford, I’ve stood on the other side of that door with my hand on the lock, saying, Not now. Not here. There’s nowhere for you to go.

Tonight, I stop saying it.

I think about the girl with the counting fingers, Yeronin’s smile, and the seventh stair. I think about Korte calling the children properly installed. Then I think about the museum of things that are mine: a rainbow, a name for a centrifuge, thirty seconds of stolen sun. Eleven years, and everything I own would fit inside a shoebox.

I let myself finish a thought I’ve been cutting off for eighteen years. I let it reach the end.

I wish someone would burn this place to the ground.

There. Done. No record except me.

Nothing happens. No alarm sounds. The ceiling keeps its one hundred and forty-four panels. My heart keeps beating, and somewhere above me, forty-one children breathe their engineered sleep. The world does not end because I wished for a match.

The knocking goes quiet. Not gone. Quiet. The way you go quiet when the person on the other side of the door finally says, I know. I hear you. Soon.

I close my eyes.

Tomorrow, I present the report.

8

THEON

The alarm hits at 0214, right on schedule, and the facility begins to eat itself.

Through my mask’s filtered air, I taste the ghost of my own work: the aerosolized confusion agent Marcus released into the ventilation twenty minutes ago, a compound I built to fray trust between armed men. It’s doing its job. Two guards at the loading dock are shouting over each other, weapons half-raised, each convinced the other triggered the breach. Darius stands thirty feet away in the shadows, unhurried, feeding their paranoia with nothing but timing and a voice pitched to sound like it comes from everywhere.

I don’t stop to watch. The lab is two sublevels down, and my window is eleven minutes.