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“And now you do?”

“We think we do.” I pointed at the comparison on the screen. “The earlier drugs damaged healthy tissue by reducing oxygen around the tumor. Aurora doesn’t.”

He studied the figures. “So the difference wasn’t that Aurora attacks the cancer more aggressively.”

“No,” I said. “It was that it left everything else alone.”

He looked back at the screen. “Meaning patients could tolerate it.”

“Exactly. Higher doses. Longer treatment. Better outcomes. Everything we were trying to engineer was already there.”

He was quiet for a moment and then he looked up. “You didn’t create the advantage.”

I smiled. “We discovered what had been there all along.”

Another silence followed before he looked back at the data. “What happens next?”

“The next trial design. I’d also like to speak with patients that were part of the clinical trials of the earlier drugs. In my research, I found that many of those patients reported feeling lightheaded after treatment and some fainted. I suspect the oxygen deprivation may have been happening throughout the body immediately after treatment.”

A look of recognition crossed his face. “That is a good idea. Let me handle that. Did you have any thoughts about the next trial design?”

“We stop treating this like a conventional pathway inhibitor. First, we determine what the finding means for dosing. Then we start defining the next patient cohort.”

We continued talking for several more minutes. He listened without interrupting. His questions were thoughtful rather than technical. Every answer led naturally to another question and before long, we were sketching out the possibilities for what came next.

At some point, we realized we had been standing there for thirty-five minutes. Neither of us had noticed.

Marcus appeared at the laboratory door just before eleven. He did not come inside. When Alexander spotted him, he excused himself briefly and stepped into the corridor. I returned my attention to the screen.

Through the glass, I could see them without hearing a word. Marcus spoke while Alexander listened without interrupting. The conversation lasted less than two minutes. Then Marcus walked away. Alexander remained in the corridor for only a moment, a single breath’s worth, before returning.

“Forgive the interruption,” he said.

“You were about to ask me another difficult question,” I said.

Alexander smiled and looked at the data again. Whatever Marcus had told him had been compartmentalized. He asked his next question about the trial design as though the interruption had not happened.

By one o’clock, the pastries were gone and the laboratory was operating at full capacity. I was reviewing some reports when the smell reached me.

It was faint. Acrid. Wrong. I lifted my head instinctively. Across the room, one of the postdocs was frowning at something and looking towards the storage corridor that ran along the laboratory’s far wall.

“Does anyone else—” she began.

The fire alarm went off.

Not a gradual sound. The alarm was a physical event, arriving simultaneously with the sprinkler system. The room simply stopped. A fraction of a second of collective disbelief before my training took over.

“Everyone out,” I said, already moving toward the door. “Leave everything. Do not take the elevator.”

The room moved at once. Blackwood Hall’s evacuation procedures were well established and well-practiced. Within moments, Margaret’s voice came over the emergency system, calm and precise. Staff appeared in the corridors, directing people toward the stairwells and the research wing emptied with practiced efficiency.

Once the others were moving toward the exits, I followed them into the corridor. Smoke drifted along the ceiling of the storage area. The smell reached me again a second later. Something was burning that should never have caught fire.

Outside, the eastern terrace filled with researchers who had left their work mid-sentence. Nobody seemed quite sure whether the emergency was over or had only just begun. Designated staff from each lab moved through the crowd, counting people as they went.

I counted once. Then again. Priya wasn’t there.

I ran toward the lab. Someone called my name. By then, I was already inside.