Page 114

It was the security officers who didn’t belong.

There was one near the entrance to the building and another beside the elevators. Neither stopped me. Both watched me pass. When the doors opened on the sixth floor, Priya was standing there.

She was not working. She was never not working. I have seen her run gels at eleven at night, answer an email in a moving car and edit a manuscript in the four minutes before a seminar. She was standing in the corridor with her hands at her sides and nothing in them.

When she saw me, she said my name and nothing else.

“What’s happened?”

“I don’t know,” she said carefully. “We were told to go home. Full pay. Security precaution.” She looked at me. There was something in her face I had not seen before, a careful arrangement of features assembled around a question she was too kind to ask me directly. “They said you’d explain.”

“I don’t—” I put my own badge to the reader. It flashed red. I did it again, slowly, the way you do a thing you have done ten thousand times and which has never once failed. I was declined again.

“Dr. Rossi.”

Marcus was at the far end of the corridor. I had not heard him arrive. He does not make a noise arriving. It had never once unsettled me until that morning.

“Marcus,” I said. “The reader is not taking my badge.”

“No,” he said. “It isn’t.” He walked toward me and stopped a respectful distance away. He held himself very straight, and I understood, watching him, that whatever this was, it was costing him something. “Mr. Blackwood would like to speak with you. He asked me to bring you up. I’m sorry to do it this way.”

I looked at the red light, then at Priya standing empty-handed in the corridor. I looked at Marcus, who had never looked at me the way he was right now, the way you look at someone you are about to be part of hurting.

“Is Aurora all right?” I asked. “Is the work…is anything damaged?”

“Nothing’s damaged,” Marcus said. “Nothing’s been touched. I give you my word.”

“Then I don’t understand.”

“No,” he said gently. “Will you come up?”

I went with him. I have thought about that elevator ride many times since.

At the time, I was not yet hurt. I was worried. Some practical, administrative part of my mind had already begun calculating what would need to happen if Aurora was closed for any length of time. The third cohort. The samples. The timelines. I assumed there had been a credible threat to the work.

More than that, I assumed Alexander had sent for me because he wanted to show me the evidence. I believed we would decide what came next together. That is the part I have never quite forgiven myself for.

Not that I was worried. Not even that I was hurt.

But that I stepped out of that elevator believing I was still part of the decision.

* * *

Alexander

She came in without knocking.

She stopped just inside the doorway, her badge still in her hand, and looked at me for a moment before taking a slow breath. That was the moment I remember most clearly.

“Marcus said you’d explain,” she said.

“Please, sit.” I gestured to the chair across from mine.

“I’d rather stand, I think.” She did not say it unkindly. She said it evenly, her whole attention on me. “Alexander. My badge doesn’t open my laboratory. Priya is in the corridor with nothing in her hands. What’s happened?”

“I’ve suspended Aurora. Temporarily. As of this morning. The team’s been sent home on full pay pending a security review. The sixth floor is closed.”

She was very still. “Why?”