Page 27 of Dose

“I don’t—” I stop and begin again. “There’s a museum.”

He waits.

“In my head. A museum of tiny freedoms. A rainbow at six forty, when the light split across my floor. One sunlit stair at Ashford, thirty seconds each day, counting by primes. Beatrice. Vladimir. Holding my breath past Room 12. A list of cruel guards. Eleven sabotage plans I designed and never used.” I realize I’m crying only when a tear reaches the corner of my mouth. “I’m twenty-four, and everything that’s actually mine would fit inside a shoebox.”

Four counts. My breath catches on the fourth.

“I dreamed about weather,” I say. “When I was small, I wanted to stand outside in real rain. Unscheduled water from an unscheduled sky. If I ever got out, that was going to be the first thing. I’d stand in it until I was ruined.”

Theon is quiet for a moment. Then he reaches past me and takes the flask off the heat before it can scorch. Somehow, that makes me laugh—wet and uneven, but real.

“Priorities,” I say.

“Batch six is for a seven-year-old with a compromised liver. She outranks both of us.” His eyes remain on my face. “It rains here. Chicago.” He pauses after the word, realizing what he has disclosed, but doesn’t take it back. “Frequently. Unscheduled.”

“Chicago,” I repeat.

“When you’re ready.”

He doesn’t make it a promise or a plan. He leaves the choice with me.

We return to work because work is where we know how to stand. Theon asks before adjusting my grip on the pipette, and I say yes. His hand closes over mine for the draw, warm and steady. Later, when I reach for buffer on the high shelf and lean into him, his hand catches my waist. I don’t move away.

Our hands brush at the reagent rack. Neither retreats.

“You’re contaminating my workspace,” I tell him, because someone has to speak.

“It’s my workspace.”

“Not since you handed me the notebook.”

“Apparently, I needed an auditor.” His eyes cut sideways to me. Almost a smile. “Someone thorough. Requested by name.”

“Careful. The last person who requested me by name had her facility burned down.”

“I’ll take my chances.”

The synthesis completes at eleven forty, the hour of the seventh stair. The compound settles into the flask with a faint green-gold shimmer from the fluorescent marker Theon builds into every taper dose so the medics can verify it under ultraviolet light.

Batch six. A seven-year-old’s path out, sitting in a flask between us.

We stand over the flask, shoulder to shoulder, closer than the work requires. He looks at it, then at me, and I understand what is happening.

Theon is the first real choice I have ever been offered. Not an assignment or a transfer order. A person who will wait while I decide what I want.

I don’t know whether I can choose him yet. I don’t know whether I know how to choose anything.

But the uncertainty belongs to me.

12

THEON

The shower runs cold because I need it to.

Isla Summer has been sleeping four meters from my bed for six days, and years of discipline have become irrelevant. I know exactly what desire does to the body. That knowledge has not helped me control my response to the way she smells when she leans over the mass spectrometer, the small sound she makes when a synthesis behaves, or the sight of her in one of my shirts because the jumpsuit she arrived in is being washed and I haven’t sourced replacements as quickly as I could have.

I refuse to examine that last point.