Page 24 of Dose

“Yes.”

“You broke protocol you’ve followed without deviation for fifteen years.”

“Yes.”

“And you did it because a woman with a clipboard flagged the same batches you would have flagged.”

“I did it because leaving her wasn’t among the possible outcomes. I ran it every way. There was no version where I walked out of that room without her.” The honesty scrapes coming out, but I owe him nothing less. “I can’t give you a cleaner answer. There isn’t one.”

He studies me. I let him. Whatever he decides, I’ll live with it. That’s what we agreed to in a corridor full of dead guards fifteen years ago.

“She stays in your quarters,” he says finally. “She doesn’t learn the layout. She doesn’t go near operations. She doesn’t see anything she could sell, trade, or surrender under questioning until we know what she is.” A beat. “We’ll assess her. Carefully. Ezra builds the profile. Marcus reads her. Dominic, when you’re able, you tell me if the person she’s presenting is the person underneath.”

“And if I’m wrong about her?” I ask, because someone has to, and it should be me.

“Then I handle it.” No cruelty in it. No apology either. “Personally. And you don’t get a vote.”

“Understood.”

“Then we’re done.” He stands, and the firing squad dissolves back into a family—Raphael returning to whatever is in the oven, Ezra annotating his tablet, Darius pointing two fingers at his eyes and then at me in a gesture that manages to be both threat and endearment.

“For the record,” he calls as I head for the corridor, “if she turns out to be evil, I get to say I told you so at every dinner for a year.”

“You didn’t tell me so.”

“I’m telling you so retroactively. It’s called foresight insurance.”

“That’s not a thing.”

“It’s a thing now. Ezra, log it.”

“Logged,” Ezra says without irony, and I cannot tell whether he’s actually typing it.

I’m almost to the corridor when Jenna catches me. She moves quietly for a pregnant woman—quietly for anyone—and touches my elbow. When I turn, all the wickedness from earlier is gone. What remains is older and kinder and harder to face.

“Hey.” She keeps her voice low, below the room’s hearing. Except Marcus’s, but Marcus pretends better than people think. “I’m not going to pile on. I just want to say one thing.”

“All right.”

“I know what that is. What you’ve got.” She nods toward Nikolai. “The moment one person matters more than everything else. I lived it from inside a cell, and then from the other side. I know it better than anyone in this building.” Her hand drifts to her belly, unconscious as breathing. “So be sure, Theon. Be sure you’re saving her for her, not for the six-year-old in the chair.”

The question lands cleanly.

“And if I can’t separate them?”

“Then figure it out fast. She’ll know the difference eventually. We always do.” She squeezes my elbow once and releases it. “For what it’s worth, tucked-in laces was the right instinct. Nik never tucked in mine. I’d have hated him about four percent less.”

“Only four?”

“It’s a competitive category.” She smiles, and there’s a whole history in it. Then she goes back to Nikolai.

The corridor down to my level is cool, dim, and quiet.

She’s still asleep when I let myself in. I stand at the glass partition between the lab and living space and watch her breathe. She’s curled on her side on the cot, one hand loosely open near her face, her hair fully loose from its tie across the pillow. Her breathing is slow and even. Four counts in. Even unconscious, she regulates it.

I know that vigilance. I’ve lived with it my whole life.

Doubt arrives on schedule and presents its evidence: Ezra’s zero-probability sequence, Damon’s flat questions, Dominic’s mirror, Jenna’s warning. Hers is the one that will keep me awake because she’s right. I can’t yet separate the woman on that cot from the boy in the chair, and unclean separations are how chemists lose fingers.