Page 7 of Dose

I push off the table and head back toward the lab. There’s titration to finish, and now there’s a great deal more.

3

ISLA

The centrifuge is called Beatrice.

She doesn’t know she’s called Beatrice because she’s a centrifuge, but I named her three years ago during a forty-hour synthesis run when I started assigning personalities to everything in the lab to stay awake. Beatrice hums when she works, a low, contented sound like someone folding laundry, and this morning she’s humming through a batch of compound V-117 while I stand at the fume hood with my hands doing what they’ve done ten thousand times before.

Measure. Transfer. Titrate. Observe.

The liquid in the flask shifts from amber to a pale, unhappy yellow, and I make a note in the log. Reaction proceeding within expected parameters. Everything in this room proceeds within expected parameters. Including me.

“You’re brooding again, Beatrice,” I tell her. “It’s very unprofessional.”

She hums back. She’s the only one here who doesn’t report my behavioral markers to Oversight, which makes her my closest friend, which is either funny or the saddest thing I’ve ever thought. I decide it’s funny. Deciding things are funny is a skill I’ve cultivated the way other people cultivate herb gardens. Carefully. In secret. In poor soil.

The facility they keep me in doesn’t have a name, just a designation—Site Nine—which I’ve privately renamed the Terrarium because everything in it is alive and watered and lit on a schedule, and none of it will ever be let outside. My quarters are down the corridor. Gray walls, gray blanket, one window made of glass thick enough to stop a rifle round. In the mornings, if the light hits it at the right angle, the window splits the sun into a smear of rainbow across my floor, and I stand in it for exactly as long as it lasts. Four minutes, usually. Six on good days.

Nobody trained me to do that. I checked. It’s not in any of my conditioning protocols. Which means it’s mine.

I have a small collection of things that are mine. The rainbow. Beatrice’s name. A habit of counting the tiles in the east corridor by prime numbers. The way I hold my breath when I pass Room 12, not because anything happens in Room 12 anymore but because something used to, and my brain remembers even when I instruct it not to.

Everything else belongs to the program.

I finish the titration and cap the flask and label it in the neat block lettering they beat into me before I lost my milk teeth. V-117, Batch 34, I. Summer. The compound is a compliance agent. I know this because I designed the delivery mechanism—an aerosol with a dispersal radius of four meters and an onset time of eleven seconds—and because Dr. Kessler told me its purpose during the design review with the same tone she uses to discuss the cafeteria menu.

Compliance agent. Two words that mean: this will be sprayed into a room where children breathe.

I set the flask in the transfer rack. My hands don’t shake. My hands never shake—that got trained out of me around the same time as crying—but there’s a sensation behind my sternum, a pressure, like a fist knocking on a door from the inside. I’ve been noticing it more lately. I haven’t logged it. Some things you don’t put in writing.

“Summer.”

Kessler’s voice arrives before she does, which is her way. She fills the lab doorway in her white coat, tablet against her hip, reading glasses pushed up into hair the color of steel wool. Her eyes go to the transfer rack first, then to me. Always in that order. The work, then the instrument that produced it.

“Batch thirty-four is complete,” I tell her. “Purity should test above ninety-eight percent.”

“It will. It always does.” She doesn’t mean it as a compliment. She means it the way you’d say a thermostat holds temperature. “Leave it. You’re being reassigned.”

The pressure behind my sternum knocks twice.

“Reassigned where?”

“Ashford.” She swipes at her tablet without looking up. “There’s been a security concern. Oversight wants the pharmaceutical stockpile audited and the synthesis protocols hardened. Dr. Korte requested someone with your profile specifically.”

Korte. I’ve never met her, but her name moves through the program the way a cold front moves through a forecast. People check their coats when they hear it.

“When do I leave?” I ask.

“Tonight. Transport at twenty-two hundred.” She lowers the tablet at last and studies me over the rims of her glasses. “Is there a problem?”

There’s a script for this moment. I’ve run it my whole life. No, Doctor. Understood, Doctor. The words are already loaded, sitting on my tongue like a pill I’ve learned to swallow dry.

I bite my inner cheek. “What’s the security concern?”

Kessler’s eyebrows lift half a centimeter, which for her is the equivalent of falling out of a chair. Instruments don’t ask follow-up questions. “That’s above your access level.”

“If I’m auditing the stockpile, I need to know what threat I’m auditing against. Theft looks different from sabotage. Sabotage looks different from infiltration. If you send me in blind, my work degrades, and my work is why you’re sending me.”