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The evidence of the fire remained. The building smelled of wet concrete and plastic. I arrived at six-fifteen, before most of the team, because there were things I needed to know before anyone asked me what we were going to do next. And because I could no longer lie in bed without doing anything.

The laboratory had been declared safe by the Environmental Health and Safety Office before dawn. The damaged storage section was sealed behind temporary barriers, but the unaffected areas had been cleared for us to begin again. The facilities manager was already inside the barricaded area, marking equipment with colored tape. Green for assessed and functional, yellow for uncertain, and red for loss. The color system was practical. The amount of red tape was not.

I stood in the doorway, looking at the room in daylight. It was different from standing here under emergency lighting yesterday. The structural damage was less than I had feared, with the storage section taking the worst of it. The wall between it and the main laboratory had done its job. What the fire had not reached, the sprinklers had. What the sprinklers had not damaged, the smoke had touched.

I went to my desk and started making a list. Lists always helped. Practical tasks, as I had learned time and time again, gave anxiety a place to go. By eight o’clock, the list had become three. By nine, it had been subdivided into five, organized by urgency and cross-referenced by dependency. Priya arrived at eight-thirty carrying her own notebook with colorful Post-its. She and I approached problem-solving the same way.

“It seems you and I had the same plan,” I said as I looked at Priya.

She shrugged. “We often seem to. I checked the data backups.”

“What did you find?”

“They are confirmed intact. All three locations. The replication results are on the secondary server. Untouched and safe.”

“Good.”

“The third cohort samples—”

“They’re gone.” This was the first thing I had confirmed when I arrived that morning. “We’ll need to recreate them from our source cultures. The backup stocks were stored separately and untouched by the fire. This does not impact the data needed for the Vienna abstract.”

She sighed in relief. “Mateo is sourcing replacement reagents. He called in a favor from someone at Columbia.”

“Good thinking.” She nodded and went to her desk.

The insurance assessors arrived at nine-thirty, followed an hour later by the structural engineer. I answered their questions, filed the necessary reports, and kept working. At some point, Priya put a cup of tea on my desk without saying anything. I thanked her and drank it without looking up.

The lab around me was alive. Mateo was on the phone, already arguing with someone in a way that suggested progress. The postdocs were compiling inventories. Two other researchers were preparing the buffers needed to set up the source cultures.

I watched this all from my desk, adding items to my lists and trying not to calculate how many months of physical work sat behind the barricade. Looking backward was not helpful. Recovery was. I turned to the next item on my list and got on with it.

* * *

I looked up from my report and found Alexander standing patiently at my office door.

I had no idea how long he had been there. He had not announced himself. His hands were in his coat pockets and his attention drifted to a point just beyond my shoulder after we made eye contact. It was a habit I had started to recognize when he was thinking something through.

I stood. “I didn’t hear you come in.”

“I didn’t want to interrupt.” He glanced at my desk. “How bad is it?”

I told him, with the precision I had been using all morning. Equipment lost, samples destroyed, timelines that needed adjusting, and what was recoverable. He listened attentively without interjecting.

“And what do you need from me?” he asked.

“For now? Time to see what we can salvage.”

He nodded. “Then that’s what you will have. What about the breakthrough itself?”

“Intact. The data, the understanding. Everything we concluded this week. That’s what matters.”

He nodded. He looked at my desk again, his eyes moving across the lists, the stack of reports, the tea Priya had placed beside my keyboard.

“How long have you been here?”

“Since a little after six.”

Concern crossed his face. “When did you last eat?”