Page 105 of Dose

None of those facts will improve because I ruin myself before morning.

I close my eyes.

Theon’s arm stays locked around me.

Cassandra can wait until morning.

29

THEON

Twenty-four hours since Ezra left through the east service lock with a duffel bag, two passive trackers and Nikolai’s permission to disappear for forty-eight hours.

The decrypted portion of the Wager archive contained a legacy contact channel keyed to C-11. Ezra sent a challenge through it. Someone answered with a meeting protocol and enough knowledge of his childhood conditioning to make coincidence unlikely. The first two routing points remain inside the Midwest.

Not proof of Marchant. A lead.

Nikolai authorized surveillance only. Ezra is not to approach Marchant if she appears, enter a second location or surrender control of his return route. Marcus has the trackers. Dominic has a mobile team close enough to intervene and far enough back that whoever answered the channel should not see them.

Forty-eight hours, Ezra requested. If the lead fails, he walks away.

I wake at 0600 to find Isla beside me, staring at the ceiling.

“Twenty-four,” she says.

“I know.”

“He could have taken one of us.”

“He could have.”

Neither of us says that our presence might have been the attachment weakness the Wager Protocol was built to exploit.

I roll onto my side. Isla slept more last night than she did the night before, but the shadow beneath her eyes remains.

“We need a distraction,” I say.

“I tried that. It produced fourteen spreadsheet tabs and an intervention involving toast.”

“Different kind. Breakfast.”

She turns her head. “You survive on ration bars and chamomile.”

“I own a stove.”

“So do millions of people who shouldn’t.”

“I’ve watched Raphael cook.”

“Watching someone perform surgery does not qualify you to perform surgery.”

“Cooking is chemistry with worse instrumentation.”

“That is the opposite of reassuring.”

But she gets out of bed and pulls on one of my shirts.

The kitchen is empty. I find eggs, flour, milk and a pancake recipe written in cups, which is evidence of a civilization hostile to measurement.