Page 35 of Dose

The secure level lies beneath everything else, behind a blast door I helped set into concrete nine years ago and have entered perhaps five times since. It has independent air and power, water for a month, and a small laboratory annex I insisted on because I refuse to be locked anywhere I cannot work.

Several sealed suites branch off the central stores. Nikolai assigns us the rear isolation suite, designed for one occupant. One living space. One bed. I try not to finish that calculation and fail immediately.

Isla walks the room’s perimeter while I cycle the seals. She inventories, catalogs, and tests. Her fingers pause at the filtration intake.

“That’s a full CBRN filtration array.”

“Yes.”

“For a residential bunker.”

“I have opinions about air.”

“You have trauma about air. It’s different.” She says it without cruelty and moves on to the shelves, water stores, and modest laboratory annex. “How long do lockdowns usually last?”

“Days. Sometimes weeks. Until Ezra’s numbers fall and Marcus stops hearing things he dislikes.”

“Weeks.” She takes in the suite again and reaches the same arithmetic I have been avoiding. One room. One bed. Two people who have spent nine days pretending their experiment has a controlled rate, sealed beneath sixty feet of concrete with the temperature controls in my hands and nothing else under control.

“I’ll take the floor,” I say.

“That’s the least scientific thing you’ve ever said.”

I turn to the annex and begin inventorying its reagents because my hands are safer occupied. If I keep looking at her, I will have to admit the state I am in.

I have not kissed her since the alcove. For two days, I have kept every other touch brief. Her mouth was swollen from mine, then it was not, and now it forms ordinary words about work as though it did not alter the structure of my life.

The cold showers have escalated from remedy to farce—two a day, three yesterday, my hand around my cock and her name locked behind my teeth. They do nothing. The wanting returns faster than I can spend it.

I have compounds that could blunt arousal. I could take one. I do not. At two in the morning, I searched the literature anyway—not for suppression, I told myself, but for an explanation. I found only physiology I already knew.

She was made in the same dark that made me. She briefed me at gunpoint. She renamed a reagent bottle Gwendolyn. Compromised is too mild. I have started organizing my decisions around her.

“Theon.”

“Mm.”

“You’ve alphabetized the same three bottles twice.”

“Quality control.”

“Your resting respiration is twelve. It’s eighteen.” She is closer than she was. I did not hear her cross the room, which means my situational awareness has deteriorated enough to horrify Nikolai. “You taught me to notice.”

“I regret teaching you anything.”

“No, you don’t.” She leans against the annex bench, arms folded, measuring me with those green eyes. Her shoulders are set and her chin is lifted. She has decided something. “Korte wants me dead or delivered. Field teams are moving through Cleveland, and your family is upstairs preparing for war. Beneath all of that, do you know what else my nervous system keeps flagging?”

I say nothing.

“You. When Nikolai said I was going below, your pulse jumped in your throat. I saw it.”

“You were in danger. It was a threat response.”

“It wasn’t a threat response when you cycled the seals. Or at dinner last night. Or the eleven times today you looked at my mouth and then at the middle distance as though it had offended you.” Her chin lifts. “I’ve been keeping a log.”

“Isla.”

“The experiment was supposed to continue at a controlled rate. You’ve been controlling it alone. That’s flawed methodology. I’m a co-investigator.”