Page 26 of Dose

“I mean the question precisely,” he says. “Not how. I know how. I know the conditioning better than anyone alive. I mean you. You saw the girl who counts her steps. You put Yeronin on a list.” I told him about Yeronin on day three, at one in the morning, over tea. My mouth has developed clearance issues around this man. “You knew what the compounds were for, down to the receptor, and your hands kept making them. I need to understand how both things lived in the same body.”

I could deflect. I have a whole cabinet of deflections, alphabetized, some of them quite funny. I open my mouth to choose one.

“There was never a choice,” I say instead.

He sets down the flask and turns toward me. I have already decided to keep talking.

“People imagine there’s a crossroads,” I say. “A clear moment when someone chooses the wrong direction. I don’t have a before. I don’t remember parents or being taken. My first memory is a corridor and a woman telling me that crying wastes water.” The pipette is still in my hand. I set it down before it can shake. “They trained the response before I was old enough to understand it. By the time I knew what they had done, obedience felt like instinct.”

“They didn’t need chains,” he says quietly.

“No. My body did the work for them.” The words come out steadier than they should. “I tried leaving once. Not actually—theoretically. I was twenty-two and spent a month awake at night, planning. Transport schedules, identity requirements, cash. The plans were sound. But every time I reached the part where I walked through the gate, my body staged a mutiny. Racing heart, tunnel vision, hands I couldn’t feel. Once, I pictured myself on a train and spent forty minutes on the floor convinced I was dying. My mind wanted out. My body had been taught that out was death.”

“The amygdala doesn’t debate,” he says. “It vetoes.”

“Exactly.” The relief of being understood at the level of neurochemistry is difficult to explain. “Underneath the panic was something worse. They taught me that my value was identical to the work. If I’m not the best chemist in the room, I’m nothing. There’s no Isla under the lab coat. Just equipment. And equipment that walks out the gate isn’t free. It’s scrap.”

I reach for the reagent because my hands need employment. They betray me anyway. A fine tremor runs through the meniscus.

Theon sees it and says nothing. He shifts closer but waits. I close the distance myself until our shoulders touch. Only then does he take over the measurement, finishing the transfer with his arm warm against mine. The tremor eases.

“Keep going,” he says.

“I hate them.” It comes out flat and clean. “Korte. Kessler. Every handler who smiled while a child disappeared behind their own eyes. I hate the compounds individually; I could give you a ranked list. I hate every seal and every page of the audit I built at Ashford.” I breathe in for four counts. “But mostly, I hate myself. I knew what the work did, and every morning my hands did it anyway. Knowing didn’t make me able to stop. It only made every day feel like another choice I had failed to make.”

The fume hood hums beside us.

I brace for one of the standard answers: It wasn’t your fault, which has never helped anyone, or judgment, which would at least be honest.

Theon gives me neither.

“I know,” he says.

I turn. His hair is pushed back, leaving the scar at his temple bare. His eyes have gone somewhere far away.

“I documented cardiac arrest in a twelve-year-old when I was thirteen,” he says. “My compound. My notes. My handwriting, very neat, because untidy documentation was punished. I recorded his final blood pressure while he died six feet from me. The part of me that should have screamed was buried so deep that I heard only the numbers.” His jaw works once. “Every man in this building has a version of that story. Conditioning gets deep enough that obedience feels like self-preservation and resistance feels like self-destruction. I know what you carry, Isla. I’ve carried it since I was six.”

“Then how—” My voice cracks, and I let it. “How did you get out?”

“Someone came for me. Nikolai mapped the rotations for two years. He showed us the bars, then broke the lock. Eight others came with me.” His eyes meet mine again. “That’s the difference between us. Not strength or will. You were alone, and you still named the centrifuge. You still found the sunlight. They tried to destroy that part of you, and they failed. You’re the evidence.”

I look away, toward Gwendolyn, who has no advice.

“Beatrice,” I say.

“What?”

“The centrifuge at Site Nine. Her name is Beatrice. She hums like a woman folding laundry. The mass spectrometer at Ashford was Vladimir. He threw an error code on day two and never apologized.” My vision blurs. I blink hard. “I’ve been naming equipment my whole life. It isn’t in any protocol. I checked. Which means it’s mine.”

“What else is yours?”

I almost miss the size of the question.

“Sorry?”

“The things they didn’t install. Before they taught you not to want anything, what did you want?” His attention is entirely on me. “What did that child dream about?”

No one has ever asked me that.