Page 14 of Dose

Mira comes with a scream that Raphael catches in his palm, her whole body seizing around me. He finally lets her finish, drawing it out until she’s sobbing curses into the cushions. I follow her over the edge with my teeth set against her shoulder, the release hitting me like a solvent stripping the last eight hours from my nervous system. For four full seconds, my mind is quiet. No formulas. No Korte. No children.

Four seconds. My personal record is nine.

Mira collapses. Raphael pulls her into his lap and strokes her hair, murmuring things too low to hear. She goes loose against him while he talks her down.

“Water,” I say, and Damon, without breaking stride, points at the side table where he’s already staged six bottles. Prepared. Always prepared.

Jenna finishes first, then Nikolai, his groan buried in her throat, his arms locked around her. He doesn’t let go afterward. He never lets go afterward. She stays folded against his chest, his hand tracing slow circles on her belly, and his eyes resume their scan of the room—counting us, checking exits, the vigilance that never fully sleeps.

“Ashford,” he says when the room has settled into loose limbs and the whiskey is passing from hand to hand. “Three days.”

“Confirmed,” Ezra says, Calla dozing on his chest. “Weather window holds. I reran the models this morning.”

“The specialist,” Marcus says. He’s on the floor now, Aiden’s head pillowed on his thigh. “She’s not security. Her purchasing patterns are pure analytical chemistry. Verification work.”

“An auditor,” I say. “Korte thinks I’ll poison the stockpile, so she brought eyes to check it.”

“Will you?” Jenna asks. “Poison it?”

“No. I need it intact. Forty-one dependencies to taper. Destroy the supply and I kill them slower than Korte would.” The whiskey burns clean going down. “The auditor is a complication, not a target. I route around her.”

“And if she routes into you?” Nikolai asks.

I consider it. A stranger in Korte’s lab, cataloging compounds, standing between me and eight critical minutes of access. Statistically, a complication. Nothing more.

“Then I’ll adjust,” I say.

Raphael snorts. “He’ll adjust. Famous last words in this family.”

“When have I ever failed to adjust?”

“Budapest,” four voices say in unison, and even Damon smiles, and Mira asks what happened in Budapest, and no one tells her, because what happens in Budapest joins everything else in the sealed archive of us.

I stay another hour. Raphael makes me eat. Darius falls asleep mid-sentence against Damon’s shoulder. Across the room, Jenna catches my eye and mouths thank you for the prenatal panel. I ran her bloodwork this week, and every result is where Raphael wants it. Good news is something I almost never get to give.

Then my mind starts running again, and I know the reprieve is over.

Back in my quarters, I shower, press my nightly dose into the outside of my thigh, and lie down in the dark with my eyes open.

Three days.

Forty-one children sleeping in a dormitory in Ashford, their blood chemistry engineered into a leash. Korte with her cattle-prod philosophy of discipline. And a specialist I’ve never met, standing in a sublevel lab, checking my old tormentor’s poisons for signs of me.

I hope, for her sake, she’s only good at chemistry.

I fall asleep composing tapering schedules, and for once, the nightmare doesn’t come.

7

ISLA

The mass spectrometer is called Vladimir.

He earned the name on day two, when he threw an error code at me for no reason and then pretended nothing had happened, which struck me as a very Vladimir thing to do. Since then, we’ve reached an understanding. I feed him samples, he tells me their secrets, and neither of us mentions the error code. Healthy relationships are built on selective amnesia. I would know. I’ve built my entire personality on it.

It’s day six of the audit, and I’m working through cabinet fourteen of twenty-two. I pull the next vial from its climate-controlled nest and hold it up to the light. The liquid is a pale gold, almost pretty.

D-40 is a dissociative maintenance compound administered orally in the morning nutrition ration. It takes effect in twenty minutes, making sure that whatever happens to a child during the day reaches their brain slightly out of focus, like watching their own life through a rain-streaked window. The child still performs and complies but is never entirely present for it.