Page 100 of Dose

By the second night, the spreadsheet has fourteen tabs and none of them agree.

I name it Cassandra because she sees disaster coming and cannot make anyone understand, including me.

Column A: facility designation. Column B: protocol adopted. Column C: implementation date. Column D: population estimate, where an estimate exists. I build formulas to cross-reference subject codes against transfer records. Each time I run them, the total changes.

The data was never built to count children. It was built to manage inventory.

I slept for four hours after Theon held me on the floor. Since then, perhaps forty minutes with my cheek against his shoulder. Time has become unreliable around the edges.

Theon sets a plate of toast beside my keyboard.

“Eat.”

“The ninth facility recycled subject codes in year three.”

“The ninth facility will still have done that after breakfast.”

“If I don’t account for it, I’m counting children twice.”

He crouches beside my chair and puts two fingers against my wrist. His expression darkens.

“When did you last drink anything?”

I look at the glass beside the monitor. It is empty. I cannot remember emptying it.

Theon fills it and returns it to the same place. “Eight rows. Then you eat, drink and sleep.”

“You cannot order me to sleep.”

“No.” He pulls a chair beside mine. “But I can make it very difficult for you to pretend this is work instead of punishment.”

I glare at him.

He picks up one piece of toast and holds it within reach. “Eight rows.”

I complete six before taking it from him.

At some point after that, my head finds his shoulder and the spreadsheet blurs into white light.

I wake at three in the morning and find Raphael in the kitchen.

He is sitting at the long table with two mugs of tea. No knife, no cutting board, no pan heating on the stove. Raphael without a task for his hands looks wrong.

He pushes one mug toward the empty chair opposite him.

“Theon asked you to speak to me?” I ask.

“No. He asked me to make sure you were medically intact. The speaking is my idea.”

I sit.

For a while, neither of us says anything.

“They trained me to hurt other subjects,” he says at last. “Directly. They wanted precision, so they taught me where pain becomes damage and punished every miscalculation.”

My fingers tighten around the mug.

“I was good at it,” he continues. “Praise was safer than failure. I know what that does to a child.”