Page 6 of Dose

“I want a sample set of whatever they’re using on the kids,” I say. “Reines’s protocols evolved past what I have on file. If Korte’s running chemistry, she’ll have inventory.”

“Noted,” Ezra says, typing something one-handed.

“Resources,” Nikolai says. “Damon, Raphael, you’re with me on the east wing. Lucien, west wing extraction. Forty-one kids. Some will fight us. Some won’t move at all. You know the patterns.”

“I know,” Lucien says quietly.

“Marcus, Darius, you’re the communications and crowd. I want their staff turning on each other before we set foot on the property. Dominic, you’re in already. Three weeks of cover.”

“Two and a half,” Dom says, “but who’s counting?”

“Ezra, Theon, you’re on the ground for the chemistry pull and the financial trace. I want every dollar that funded Ashford tracked back to its source before we leave the perimeter.”

Ezra nods once. I nod once.

“Extraction for the children?” Raphael asks.

“Three convoys. We’ve placed forty-one slots through the network. Spread across four states. No two children to the same destination. Standard protocol.”

“Forty-one,” Raphael repeats.

The room goes quiet again. Forty-one is a number. It’s also forty-one small bodies with forty-one small histories, and every one of us at this table knows exactly what it feels like to be one of those numbers in a different facility, in a different decade.

“Forty-one out,” Nikolai says. “All of them. No exceptions. No casualties on our side. We will move in eleven days.”

“Eleven days is tight,” Ezra says, “but the probability curve is favorable. Vasiliev travels to Washington, D.C., on day twelve. We want him on site.”

“We want him on site,” Nikolai agrees.

Damon hasn’t said much. He’s been watching Darius’s hand, which is back on the table now, fingers tapping a slow pattern against the wood. He reaches across, without looking, and laces his fingers through Darius’s to still them. Darius exhales. The tapping stops.

“Eleven days,” Damon says. “Workable.”

“Workable,” Marcus echoes.

“Workable,” I say, wanting it to be true.

Nikolai looks at each of us. The count again. The inventory.

“Briefings continue at twenty hundred. Eat. Rest. Prepare. Theon, I need your full pharmaceutical workup on the conditioning compounds by tomorrow. Marcus, I want Korte and Vasiliev’s full movement patterns by Thursday. Ezra, financial trace by Friday.”

A round of nods. The meeting breaks the way our meetings always break, not with dismissal but with people slowly remembering they have hands and bodies and breakfasts cooling on the counter.

Raphael goes back to the kitchen. Lucien rises from the floor in one fluid motion that still, after all these years, makes me wonder how someone who has died as many times as he has moves like that. Ezra collapses his tablets in a sequence. Dominic stays at the table, looking at the schematic, already beginning to inhabit whoever he’ll need to be in Ashford.

Darius bumps his shoulder against mine. “You good?”

“I have eleven days to map a chemistry protocol I haven’t seen in fifteen years and prepare a delivery system for a woman who used to make me count backward in Croatian. So yes. I’m great.”

He grins. “That’s the spirit.”

“Shut up, Voss.”

“Love you too, Kovač.”

He drifts off toward Damon. I stay where I am for a moment, hands flat on the table, looking at the schematic on the wall. Forty-one children. Eleven days. One name I’ve been waiting fifteen years to write a final formula for.

Korte.