Page 62 of Dose

When I finally step back, Theon’s hair is no longer neat.

“You were saying something about central security,” I remind him.

He looks at me for a long moment, then turns to the plan with the rigid control of a man counting molecular weights to calm himself.

“From the top. You hear gunfire. What happens first?”

“I get low, identify the direction⁠—”

“No. Before the decision. What happens in your body?”

“Startle response. Heart rate rises. Hearing may narrow. Fine motor control gets worse.”

“And what do you do?”

“Exhale. Find cover. Look before I move.”

He makes me demonstrate. Because he is still under restrictions, Damon has forbidden him from correcting me physically. Theon has therefore developed a vocabulary of precise and increasingly irritated instructions for the angle of my feet.

We work through lost communications, blocked corridors, a separated team, an injured escort. He drills me on the building until I can reconstruct the relevant sections without looking at the plan.

I am good at that part. It is not the same as being good in the field, a distinction Damon has made twice and Nikolai once. But pattern recognition transfers. Production sequences and security rotations are both systems: rhythms, dependencies, points where one failure propagates into the next. I catch an inconsistency in the secondary route before Theon does, a fire door marked as opening against the direction of evacuation.

He studies it, checks the revision Ezra sent, then draws a line through the route.

“Good,” he says.

The word lands in my chest with embarrassing force.

“Again.”

“I was just good.”

“Be good twice.”

I am.

We stop at eleven when Theon’s stomach interrupts his campaign to make me impossible to kill. The kitchen is occupied. Darius is stirring sauce at the stove one-handed, his healing left shoulder held close to his body. Damon sits at the counter with a book and the yellowing remains of his Atlanta bruise along one cheekbone.

Darius looks us over. His gaze pauses on Theon’s hair.

“Productive morning?”

“Very,” I say.

“How are the extraction protocols?”

“Rigorous,” Theon says.

Darius smiles into the sauce. “I’m sure they are.”

Damon turns a page. “They came through here an hour ago. Her ponytail was intact then.”

My hand rises to my hair. It is listing badly to the left.

“Observation,” Damon adds. “Not surveillance.”

“Your attention to operational detail is inspiring,” I tell him.