Petrov's eyes widened. "Boje moi. So, it has started."
"The other one is loose. It will probably fall out later today or tonight."
Petrov glanced toward the lab's windows, confirmed that no one was visible outside, and leaned closer. "Are the fangs coming out?"
"I can feel them pushing down. The gums are swollen." Dimitri pulled the mask back up. "Mattie came up with the mask idea. A cold explains the mask, the mask covers the mouth, and wearing a mask reinforces the impression that I'm human."
Petrov turned to Mattie. "Devochka, you have a good brain under that blonde hair of yours."
Mattie arched a brow. "Was that a blonde joke? Because if it was, it wasn't good."
"I try." Petrov shrugged. "I thought it was."
Dimitri stifled a chuckle. "Should we get started on the shipment?"
"Oh, yes. The shipment." Petrov picked up a clipboard from his bench. "Twenty-three boxes. I went over the manifest, and we're missing dimethyl sulfoxide and the chromatography columns I requested six weeks ago. They did send the acetonitrile, though, which is something. Three of the boxes are marked in Mandarin, and I can't read the labels, so I don't know what's inside them."
"Those would be Zhao's supplies. Probably reagents for the original enhancement formula." Dimitri crossed to the storage area where the crates were stacked. "You should catalog everything before Dave's afternoon session. I want to run a new set of stability tests on the latest batch."
"All work and no play," Mattie murmured from her spot by the window.
"I can play," Dimitri said.
Mattie gave him a look that could have melted titanium. "Prove it tonight."
"I will," he promised.
Petrov's gaze bounced between them. "Do I want to know?"
"No," they said simultaneously.
"Wonderful." Petrov returned to his distillation setup. "The youth of today. No boundaries, no shame, and no volume control. I heard you laughing in the shower this morning. You should know that the walls in this building are thin. You should remember that."
Mattie's cheeks turned pink. "Sorry."
"Don't apologize. It's nice to hear people laugh." He adjusted a clamp on the condenser. "There hasn't been enough of it around here."
Dimitri looked at his mentor and felt a surge of affection for the guy. Petrov, with his vodka and his Russian folk music, and his nearly nightly vigils at the brothel protecting a woman he couldn't save, was a better man than Dimitri had ever suspected him to be.
They had been friends before the fiasco that had landed Petrov in an insane asylum and Dimitri at a gulag, but they had never been as close as they had become on this island.
From a mentor and a friend, Petrov had become a father figure and a co-conspirator who had earned his trust through a thousand small acts of decency in a place designed to stamp decency out.
Dimitri pulled on his lab gloves, adjusted his mask, and got to work. The crates weren't going to inventory themselves, and the chemicals inside them were the raw materials of the enhancement drugs that kept Dave stable, the formulas that kept Losham satisfied, and somewhere in the margins, hidden in coded journal entries and unlabeled vials, the work that actually mattered.
The regenerative compound for Mattie's scars and the anti-compulsion formula that he still needed to keep his mind his own.
17
DAVE
The Humvee was built for rough terrain and military utility, not comfort, and every pothole on the road that cut through the island's central ridge reminded all eight of Dave of that fact.
Number Seven was behind the wheel, which was not a random assignment. Of the eight bodies, Seven had the best spatial awareness when it came to operating vehicles, a quirk of the individual mind that had existed before the merge and persisted afterward like a phantom.
The remaining seven of Dave occupied the jump seats that were bolted along both sides of the rear compartment of the expanded-capacity model, the tight configuration close enough for the collective consciousness to hum at full coherence.
The road descended through a tunnel carved into the volcanic rock of the ridge and emerged on the other side of the island, where the landscape changed. The manicured gardens and whitewashed buildings of the resort side gave way to flat terrain, the dense vegetation broken up by concrete structures that squatted low against the ground. Most of the barrackscomplex was underground, carved into the bedrock to escape the heat, but the surface installations spread across several square kilometers.
