Page 10 of Dose

I dry my hands and pick up the tablet. The intercepted manifest is thin—flight logs, a supply requisition, a personnel code rather than a name. S-C-P dash something. The requisition list underneath it is not thin at all, and I read it twice because the first read seems wrong.

“She ordered analytical standards,” I say. “Reference-grade. Full chromatography consumables. Stability-testing reagents.”

“Meaning what?”

“Meaning Korte brought in someone to audit the stockpile and rebuild the synthesis protocols.” I scroll further. Cold-chain packaging. Validation columns. The shopping list of a careful chemist, not a butcher. “They know someone’s coming. They’re hardening the chemistry before we arrive.”

Marcus leans against the bench, arms crossed, and I watch him filter the room—the centrifuge’s bearing wobble he’ll mention to me next week, the faint bitterness off batch three that tells him it’s failing before my assay will. “Does it change your extraction plan?”

“It changes my timeline inside the lab wing. An audited stockpile means new inventory seals, new access logs. I’ll need eight extra minutes to pull samples without leaving a footprint.” I hand the tablet back. “It also means there will be a second chemist in that building. Competent enough that Korte asked for her.”

“Nikolai wants to know if she goes on a list.”

The question sits between us, ordinary as the hum of the fume hood. Twenty years ago, someone stood in a corridor and decided which children were assets and which were disposal. The decision took them seconds. I make myself take longer.

“I don’t have enough data,” I say. “Someone who orders reference standards documents everything. Documentation is either complicity or evidence, depending on what she does when the doors come open.”

“That’s not an answer.”

“It’s the only honest one I have. Tell Nikolai she’s an unknown, not a target. Not yet.”

Marcus watches me for a moment longer than necessary. His nostrils flare once, and I know he’s reading my cortisol as plainly as I read a titration curve. Whatever he finds, he keeps it to himself.

“Eight extra minutes,” he says. “I’ll tell him. He won’t like it.”

“He’d like contaminated samples less.”

He collects the tablet and pauses at the door. “Batch three is off, by the way. Smells like acetone and regret.”

“I know.”

“Sleep in your actual bed tonight, Theon. The cold room makes your blood sound strange.”

Then he’s gone, and the lab is mine again, and I stand very still beside the failing batch.

A specialist Korte requested by name. Twenty-two years ago, that request would have carried a subject number. Send me C-08. He tolerates the aerosols. Somewhere in Ashford tonight, a woman is unpacking validation columns into a laboratory two floors below forty-one dosed children, and I don’t yet know whether she’s another Korte or another me.

I pour batch three down the neutralization drain and start again, changing everything.

Either way, I’ll find out in eight days.

5

ISLA

The transport smells like diesel and old snow. For the last forty minutes of the drive, I count the seams in the vehicle’s ceiling because counting keeps my hands still, and still hands are what Dr. Korte will expect from the specialist she requested by name.

Ashford looks nothing like Site Nine from the outside. Site Nine hides inside a decommissioned water treatment plant, all rust and municipal boredom. This place wears the skin of an agricultural research institute in rural Pennsylvania: low concrete buildings crouched behind birch trees, a weathered sign in English promising soil studies and crop-yield research. The fences are the same, though. Fences are always the same. Twelve feet, angled inward at the top.

Inward. So people understand which direction the fence cares about.

Guards check my credentials at three separate checkpoints. At the third, a woman in a gray uniform runs a wand over my equipment cases and asks me to open the one holding my reference standards. I do. She stares at the vials nested in foam like they might explain themselves, then waves me through.

Dr. Korte waits inside the main entrance, and I know her before she speaks. Not from photographs. From posture. She stands the way all of them stand—the senior ones, the architects. Weight balanced, chin level, hands folded in front of her like she’s presiding over a funeral she arranged herself. She’s smaller than I expected. Silver hair cropped close to her skull. Glasses with thin steel frames.

“Specialist Summer.” She doesn’t extend a hand. “Your flight was adequate?”

“It was on time.”