Page 46 of Dose

Ezra looks at me with sudden, unnerving intensity. “Supplier dependencies?”

“Yes. Including precursors they cannot source domestically. I spent eleven years at Site Nine. Six inside production. I did not merely follow their system. I made parts of it more efficient.” My throat tightens, but my voice does not. “Which means I know where those parts fail.”

No one speaks for several seconds.

Then Theon says, “No.”

His arm has left the back of my chair. His face has become controlled in the way it does when he handles something volatile.

I turn from the display. “No?”

“You’re a retrieval target with a death clause. The moment your knowledge becomes visible in an operation, Korte stops wondering whether you survived. She’ll recognize your work.”

“She already assumes I may be alive.”

“Assuming is not knowing.”

“I am not proposing to enter a hub. I am proposing to show you the load-bearing parts of its network.”

“And put your signature on the breach. I recognized you from one audit. Korte had six years of your production work.”

“Good.” The word carries more heat than I intend. “Let her recognize it. Let her know the instrument turned around.”

“Isla.”

“No. Listen to me.” I face him fully. The room is watching now, but I decline to be ashamed of taking up its attention. “Before you found me, everything I had chosen for myself fit inside a shoebox. A rainbow. A stair. Eleven sabotage plans I designed and never used because I could not make myself cross the threshold.”

My voice cracks. I let it.

“Those plans were versions of this. I carried them for years in the only place the program could not audit. You helped me understand that wanting something did not make punishment inevitable.” I hold his gaze. “You cannot help me make one choice and then confiscate the next because it frightens you.”

His hands curl against the table.

“Hundreds of children are taking compounds built from routes I helped optimize,” I say. “I am not asking permission to provide intelligence. I am telling you what I want. I want to help end it.”

The silence stretches.

Darius opens his mouth. Damon puts a hand over it without looking. For once, Darius permits this.

Nikolai sets down his coffee and turns to Ezra. “If her model is accurate?”

“Then the three hubs become our intelligence choke points,” Ezra says. “Not three raids. Three systems to penetrate quietly. We can rebuild the facility map from their shipments and plan extractions around the children’s medical dependencies.”

“Time?”

“A week of structured intake for an initial model. Longer to validate it against live logistics.” He glances at me. “Potentially longer if every piece of hardware receives a name.”

“Only the difficult ones,” I say.

Nikolai looks at me. “You are offering intelligence support from this facility. No field deployment.”

“That is what I offered.”

“And if the model later requires you on site?”

“Then we discuss it later. We do not pretend I have agreed in advance to stay behind under every imaginable circumstance.”

Theon’s attention snaps to me.