Page 17 of Dose

“East wing secure.” Damon’s voice in my ear, flat and mechanical through his mask. “Nineteen children moving. They walk in formation. They won’t break it even now.”

“Don’t make them break it,” I say, taking the stairwell three steps at a time. “Formation is safety to them. Use it.”

“Copy.”

“Lucien, dormitory four,” Nikolai cuts in. “Three nonambulatory. Sedation levels are wrong.”

“They’re not wrong.” I badge through the first security door with credentials Ezra cloned from a dead man’s file. “Korte doubled the D-40 on the youngest ones this week. Somebody warned her we were coming, and she chose compliance over caution. Carry them. Do not attempt reversal in the field. Their hearts won’t tolerate it.”

“Understood.” Lucien sounds like he’s already carrying one. He probably is.

Second sublevel. The corridor lights strobe red, leaving everything black between pulses. My boots make no sound on the polished concrete. This hallway smells of industrial disinfectant and, beneath it, the faint almond note of a benzaldehyde spill someone cleaned imperfectly. My mask flags trace acetonitrile. Standard. Nothing weaponized in the air.

The laboratory door stands unlocked.

That stops me for half a second. Korte locks everything. Korte locked me in a chamber with chlorine gas when I was nine and timed how long it took me to identify the concentration. Korte does not leave doors open.

I enter low, pistol first, sweeping the corners. Empty. Rows of fume hoods, a mass spectrometer humming to itself in the corner, glassware racked with a neatness that borders on devotional. I holster the weapon and go to work.

The stockpile vault is exactly where the floor plans promised. I pull sample vials with gloved hands, moving down the shelves in sequence. D-40 in three concentrations. V-117, the compliance agent. My stomach tightens because the synthesis is cleaner than anything the program produced when I was inside it. Someone talented made this. Someone with hands better than Korte’s.

I photograph the batch logs, and then I see what is wrong.

Every compound is verified. Every lot number is cross-referenced against purity assays run within the last eight days. The documentation isn’t Korte’s cramped, paranoid shorthand. It’s clean. Elegant, even. Whoever wrote these protocols annotated the margins with degradation curves I would have drawn myself, flagged two batches for thermal instability that Korte’s people missed entirely, and rebuilt the chain-of-custody system from scratch. The audit is comprehensive. It’s beautiful.

It also means every sample I’m stealing has been cataloged by a mind sharp enough to notice what’s missing.

The specialist. Marcus’s auditor.

“Theon, status.” Nikolai’s voice is tight.

“Stockpile secured. Six minutes.”

“Korte’s office is empty. Ezra’s tracking her vehicle. She ran the moment the perimeter went dark.”

Of course she ran. Cowardice was always her most reliable trait. I file the rage away for later, seal the sample case, and turn toward the protocol archive at the back of the lab.

The archive door is ajar. Steady white light bleeds through the gap.

I draw again and push the door open with my shoulder.

She’s standing at the far workstation with a stack of files clutched against her chest, and she is not running.

My first assessment is tactical: female, mid-twenties, five foot six, athletic, no visible weapon, lab coat over a dark green jumpsuit, exits blocked by me. My second assessment has no place in a breach report: I find her beautiful.

She’s small and sharp-boned, her blonde hair pulled into a ponytail that’s coming loose at one temple. There’s a smudge of ink on her jaw where she must have rested her pen. Her eyes are green and fixed on me with an expression I have spent my life learning to read in test subjects but cannot immediately classify.

It isn’t terror. Terror has a chemical signature, a posture, a breath pattern. Her breathing is elevated but controlled. Four counts in. She’s regulating it deliberately.

She’s been trained the way I was trained.

“Put the files down,” I say. The mask flattens my voice into machinery.

She doesn’t. Her gaze moves over me in a sequence I recognize because it’s my own: mask, hands, sample case, holster, back to the mask. Cataloging. Assessing threat by equipment rather than size. Then her eyes flick to the red light pulsing through the doorway behind me and back.

“You’re the one who came for the children,” she says.

Not a question. Her voice is quiet and steady. It catches me off guard.