Page 55

* * *

The alarm continued to ring. Water flowed steadily from the sprinklers, turning the corridor slick beneath my shoes. The smoke hung lower now, thicker.

“Priya!”

The laboratory doors were open. The lights were somehow still on. The storage section had disappeared behind a gray haze. I searched until I saw her at the second shelf from the left. Relief hit me hard. She was holding the portable hard drives in one hand and was reaching for a sealed storage container in the other.

“Priya.” I crossed the room. “We need to go.”

“The samples from the third cohort—”

“Priya.”

“They’re right here. I can carry them—”

“The samples can be recreated. You cannot.” I took her arm. “The data is backed up. The understanding is here,” I said as I touched my own temple. “We are leaving.”

She looked at the shelf for one more second. Then she let me move her toward the door. The smoke had thickened. Beneath the sound of the alarm, the building gave a deep, unsettling groan.

“This way,” said a voice behind us. I had not heard him come in. Alexander was two steps behind us, his coat dark with water from the sprinklers. His expression belonged to a man focused entirely on getting us out of the building and nothing else.

Without announcement or explanation, he guided us toward the far stairwell. I had never used it before today. We moved.

The terrace was cold and loud when we came through the side door.

Someone was calling for Priya. I heard several others saying my name.

A firefighter approached us and asked whether anyone remained inside. I answered him and watched as he disappeared toward the building. Only then did I sit down on the steps. My legs suddenly felt weak. Priya sat down next to me, a blanket wrapped around her shoulders, and we watched the gray smoke drift from the storage section windows. From outside, it was clear the fire had been contained to one part of the sixth floor, though there was no way yet to know how much damage the smoke and sprinklers had done.

We didn’t speak. I reached for Priya’s hand and squeezed it. Something warm settled around my shoulders. A blanket. I knew who had put it there before I looked. He crouched beside me. I could feel the warmth coming off him on that cold terrace. His palm came to rest between my shoulder blades, steady and deliberate. I had been holding myself very carefully upright since the alarm sounded. I relaxed and leaned back into his hand.

We looked at each other, and I understood the question in his eyes. I nodded once. His hand remained there for a moment longer before he rose and turned his attention back to the building.

* * *

We were all evaluated by medical staff. None of us had suffered anything more than minor smoke exposure.

I told the team to go home and rest while I waited for the firefighters to complete their assessment. It took three hours to find out what we had lost. The fire safety officer delivered his findings with the confidence of someone who had done this many times before. The fire had originated in the storage section, the preliminary cause being an electrical fault in a secondary circuit panel. I was told that the investigation remained ongoing.

The biological samples on shelves two through five were destroyed. Three months’ worth of prepared trial materials were lost.

The two most important things had survived: the data and the knowledge. The servers were housed offsite and protected by a separate system. Everything that had been discovered the previous day still existed: in Priya’s head, in mine, and in the replicated data stored safely beyond the fire’s reach. Priya could still submit her abstract to Vienna.

I reminded myself that only tangible work had been lost. The things we could hold, measure, grow, and analyze again.

I thanked the officer. As he turned to leave, another firefighter approached him and spoke too low for me to hear. The officer glanced once toward the storage section before the two of them walked away.

Exhaustion left little room for curiosity. When they finally allowed us inside, I walked back in to see what the fire had left us.

* * *

The laboratory looked like a place that had tried to protect itself.

The sprinklers had done exactly what they were designed to do. The room was wet, dark, and carried the smell of soot and ash. Equipment that had been installed and running only hours earlier was now in various states of uncertainty. Some of it would be salvageable. Some of it would not.

I walked through slowly, watching my step on the damp floor.

I stopped at the whiteboard. That morning, it had been filling with ideas faster than we could test them. Now the writing was blurred by water, but still legible.