Page 19 of Dose

A pause. “Define asset.”

“Korte’s specialist. The auditor.” I move through the lab toward the stairwell, carrying her past the vaults she spent eight days protecting. “She’s alive. She stays that way.”

“That wasn’t the mission.”

“No,” I agree, taking the stairs. “It wasn’t.”

Outside, the night is black and cold. Children are being loaded into vehicles by men in masks who are gentler than anyone would believe. I report clear. The first charges thump in the administration wing, well away from the recovered medication, and Ashford begins to burn exactly the way Isla wished it would.

Her head rests against my chest. My brothers will want an explanation.

I don’t have one. I have only one certainty: leaving her behind to burn was never an option.

9

ISLA

The headache arrives before I do.

That’s how I know I’m alive. Death wouldn’t bother with a headache this vicious, this rude, drilling into the space behind my left eye like a debt collector. Then there’s the taste: metallic, with a bitter finish that coats the back of my tongue. My brain starts working before my eyes open because it has never once asked my permission for anything.

Short-acting sedative. My heart is steady and my lungs are clear, which rules out anything crude. The metallic taste suggests it was built to clear the blood quickly. Custom work. You can’t buy this. Someone made it, which means⁠—

The man in the gas mask didn’t shoot me.

I open my eyes.

The ceiling has forty-eight matte-gray panels arranged in a grid so exact that someone measured twice. I count them anyway, because counting is how I take attendance of myself, and everything reports for duty. Fingers. Toes. Headache, punctual as ever. One injection mark on each upper arm means he used the second dose I agreed to for transport. He said five or six hours each. My body says half a day.

The pressure behind my sternum is still there, alert and curious. You’re somewhere new. Sit up. Look.

I sit up. I look.

It’s a laboratory. My first thought is of course it is. My second is no, wait, because I’ve lived in laboratories my whole life and none of them ever looked like this. Yes, there’s a fume hood breathing against the far wall and racked glassware arranged with the kind of devotion I thought only I practiced. But there’s also a kettle in the corner with a tin of loose tea beside it. A mug sits upside down on a drying rack, angled at forty-five degrees. Through a sealed glass partition, I can see a second room: a bed with a dark blanket, a wall of books, an amber floor lamp.

Someone works here and lives here, the two halves of that sentence separated by nothing but glass.

I’m on a cot near the partition, still in my green jumpsuit, my boots set neatly at the foot of the frame with the laces tucked in. Somebody tucked in my laces. I stare at them for longer than the situation warrants because, in eighteen years of institutional life, no one has ever done that for me, and I don’t have a shelf in the museum for it yet.

The door opens with a soft pneumatic hiss, and the man from Ashford walks in without his mask.

Before this moment, I knew him as designation C-08: chemistry aptitude, escaped asset, voice like machinery, a hand that held a pistol on me and then, inexplicably, didn’t.

Now he has a face, and the face is a problem.

He has bronze skin, a sharp jaw, and black hair worn long on one side, falling across his cheek, the other side faded short over ink that climbs behind his ear and down his neck. My eyes catch on the designs because some of the decoration isn’t decorative. A molecular structure is worked into the petals of a rose. A chemical formula hides inside a skull.

His eyes are ice-blue and direct. I’ve been observed my whole life—cameras, evaluators, Kessler over her reading glasses—but he isn’t evaluating me. I don’t know what to do with that.

“You’re awake.” His unfiltered voice is softer than the mask promised. Low and careful. “The headache will fade. Drink.”

He carries a glass of water and two white tablets, which he sets on the small table beside the cot. Within reach, but not so close that I have to take them from his hand. He’s giving me a choice about the distance. I know exactly what he is doing.

“Paracetamol?” I ask.

“Yes. Unless you’d prefer to suffer on principle.”

“I have very few principles. None of them cover headaches.” I take the tablets. The water is cool and tastes like nothing, which after Ashford’s mineral-heavy taps is its own small luxury. “Your sedative has an aftertaste. Metallic. You should fix your formula.”