Page 18 of Dose

“Step away from the workstation.”

“C-08.” She says my designation carefully, as if it might trigger something. “Korte told me you’d poison the stockpile. I spent eight days making sure you couldn’t.” Her chin lifts a fraction. “I ran purity assays on everything. It’s all intact. If you’re tapering their dependencies, the D-40 in vault three is your cleanest supply. Lots fourteen through twenty-two. The rest has stability problems above twenty degrees Celsius.”

I stand very still.

She just handed me the exact information I came here to extract, unprompted, in the technical shorthand of someone who understood before I walked through this door precisely why I would need it. Tapering. She said tapering. She knows I’m not here to burn the pharmacy. She knows I need it whole.

“Why are you telling me this?”

The files tighten against her chest. For the first time, her control slips at the edges. “Because there’s a girl in dormitory two who counts her steps so she doesn’t have to think about where she’s walking. Because I verified the compounds that keep her compliant and I did it perfectly, and I—” She stops. Breathes. Four counts. “Because I wanted someone to burn this place down, and now someone is, and I find that I don’t want to be on the wrong side of the fire.”

“Theon.” Nikolai’s voice fills my ear. “Four minutes. All forty-one are outside. Charges are armed in the administration wing and tied to our exit beacons. Move.”

The pistol is steady in my hand. Mission parameters are unambiguous. She is Project Architect personnel. She built the audit that hardened this facility against me. She synthesized compliance agents that kept forty-one children docile. I have killed thirteen people for less, and my hands did not tremble for any of them.

My hand isn’t trembling now. I’m not firing, either.

I try to see her the way my conditioning taught me: a biological system, a collection of vulnerabilities, roughly sixty percent water and a nervous system that can be switched off. Instead, I see the margins of her audit notes, the degradation curves, and the two unstable batches she flagged that I would have flagged. I see how she thinks. She is standing her ground in front of an armed man in a gas mask because of a girl who counts her steps.

I have never in my life looked at a complication and wanted to take her home.

“What’s your name?”

She blinks. It’s the first thing I’ve said that surprises her. “Isla. Isla Summer.”

“Theon, three minutes.” Nikolai’s voice hardens. “Whatever you’re doing, finish it.”

Isla reads the answer in my silence. Her shoulders settle. “It’s all right,” she says, her voice barely moving the air. “I audited my own life this week. It doesn’t balance. Just—the files in my left hand are the dosing histories. Individual records, all forty-one. You’ll need them for the taper. Take them first.”

She is organizing her own execution around the welfare of the children.

The decision is immediate. By the time I recognize it, my hand is already lowering the pistol.

I holster it. Her eyes widen. From my thigh kit, I draw an auto-injector loaded with a sedative of my own design: onset in about a minute, minimal cardiac and respiratory suppression. I built it for extractions. I never expected to use it like this.

“This will feel cold,” I say. “Then nothing. One dose should keep you under for five or six hours. The trip is longer than that. If you wake before we reach the safe site, I may need to give you one more. Do I have your permission?”

“You’re not going to kill me.” She says it slowly, testing the sentence for structural flaws.

“No.” I cross the space between us. Up close, she smells of acetone and lavender soap. For half a second, I am six again. I force the memory down; there is no time. Beneath those scents is the tea she must have been drinking hours ago. Chamomile. She tips her head back to keep my mask in view, but she doesn’t step away. “I’m going to take you with me.”

“That’s a terrible idea.”

“Yes.”

Her gaze drops to the injector. “One more dose if the first wears off. Nothing else.”

“Agreed.”

Something moves across her face that, in any other context, I would call the beginning of a laugh. Then she turns her arm and offers me the muscle below her shoulder without flinching.

I know that gesture too well. The trust in it unsettles me more than resistance would have.

I press the injector to her upper arm. She exhales at the cold flush, and I count with her. Just after a minute, her knees soften, and I catch her before she falls. Her grip on the files loosens but doesn’t release completely. I ease them free finger by finger and stack them in my case with the samples.

“Theon.” Final warning in Nikolai’s tone. “Ninety seconds.”

“Coming out. I have the samples, the protocols, and the dosing histories.” I lift her fully into my arms. Her ponytail comes loose over my sleeve. Without the controlled expression, she looks younger than my first estimate. “And one additional asset.”