Page 145 of Victorious

“I thought you were a chemist,” he observed when he saw the equipment.

“Biochemist,” she corrected. “And in order to fix the problem, I need to understand it. That means getting a picture of what happens without the compound in your system. Is it wearing off yet?”

Victor made a fist, testing his nerves, but they felt dull. Ordinary. “Not yet.”

“Okay good. Hop up on the table and unbutton your shirt.”

He did, revealing the three neat scars where Eli had shot him the night Angie died, as well as a dozen other minor marks accrued in the intervening years, his body keeping score in a way Eli’s never did. Dani sucked in a breath at the sight of them.

“There are people who hunt for people like me,” he said, by way of explanation. “If they caught me, they’d do worse.”

“Yeah, well,” said Dani. “If the university knew I was using their equipment to play lab rat with a willing human subject, I’d be in trouble, too. So let’s agree to keep it between us. Now, lie down.”

The metal pressed against Victor’s back, cold seeping through his shirt, and déjà vu washed over him. There were no straps. No current. But he still half expected to blink and see Angie’s red curls, her worried face. Instead, there was only Dani, her black curls pulled back and her dark eyes narrowed in concentration.

In true teacher’s fashion, she explained what she was doing as she did it. Attaching the pulse oximeter to his right hand, then the electrodes for the EKG. His vitals showed up on the screen, smooth lines interrupted by the rhythmic spikes of his heart. As he watched, he felt his nerves shift, and brighten, the pins-and-needles prickle as his power flooded back.

“The compound’s wearing off,” he said.

It wasn’t as quick as flipping a switch, but it didn’t take long. His nerves flared. He flexed his fingers, turning the dial of his own pain threshold up and down. On the screen, his vitals flickered, too, pulse ticking upward with the discomfort, falling when he turned the sensitivity back down. He controlled it while he could. Nearby, Dani’s body hummed with energy, a complex web of nerves and currents. Strings waiting to be pulled. With his senses sharpened, the metal table beneath him registered as bitingly cold. His neck ached. He felt too much, resisted the temptation to turn it down, turn it off. His left hand flexed around the inhaler.

“Try to relax,” she said.

“Easier said than done, under the circumstances.”

She held her hand out, clearly expecting him to relinquish the inhaler. His fingers tightened.

“What?” she said dryly. “Don’t you trust me?”

Victor didn’t. That was why he’d followed her home after their first meeting. And why he’d cloned her phone—her fault, for leaving it in her office while she taught—so he’d know if she called the cops, or emailed anyone about the formula, or ran any unencrypted searches on terms that might garner the wrong types of attention. To his surprise—and relief—she had done none of the above.

“Don’t take it personally,” he said, handing over the disc inhaler. “I don’t trust anyone.”

“And look where it’s gotten you.”

His mouth twitched. She reminded him of Eli—not what he became, but what he was. The version that dropped into Victor’s life, before he went off like a bomb. The edge, the intensity, the humor glinting like a knife.

It was disorienting. So much that he almost missed the first warning. Pain twinged across his side.

“It’s starting,” he said, before fitting the narrow mouthguard between his teeth, the one he’d learned to wear, to keep from breaking them when his body spasmed and his jaw locked shut.

Dani’s attention flicked from the screens to him and back. “Tell me what you feel.”

He didn’t want to, but he did, talking around the rubber mouthguard.

Described the first, cramping sensation in his ribs. The tightness in his chest. The moments he could breathe, and the ones he couldn’t. He’d experienced it so many times by now. He’d lived inside the pain. The way it turned up, like the dials in the lab that day, suddenly spiking toward agony. Toward death.

Dani told him to wait, as long as he could, and he did. He waited, until the pain made his muscles seize, until the edges of his sight went black, until his vitals guttered on the monitor. He waited, drifting closer and closer to death, knowing that he would likely not survive another brush with it.

In the end, it was Dani who pulled him back.

Who forced the inhaler to his lips and ordered him to breathe.

As soon as the compound hit his system, the agony subsided. The dying stopped. Victor sagged back against the table, limbs trembling and skin slick with sweat as his vitals leveled on the screen.

“Okay,” she said, blowing out a breath as if she’d gone through the ordeal instead of witnessing it.

Victor dragged his exhausted body upright, pried the mouthguard from between his teeth. “Did you get what you needed?”