Page 3 of Dose

Three feet. The same distance as the antidote on his tray.

Reines is still alive. She lives in Lisbon now, under a name she thinks is clean. She gardens. She has grandchildren. The file on her sits in my workshop, waiting for me to decide what her ending should be.

The tea is bitter on my tongue. Skullcap always is. I drink it anyway.

Somewhere down the corridor, a door opens and closes. Soft footsteps. Probably Marcus, walking the perimeter the way he does when his head is too loud. I don’t go out to meet him. He won’t want company. I don’t want it either.

I finish the tea and rinse the cup, before setting it upside down on the drying rack at a precise forty-five-degree angle.

Then I go back to bed, and I lie down, and I wait for the dream to come again.

It always does.

2

THEON

By six in the morning, I’m in the lab with the partition sealed and music playing through the bone-conduction clip behind my ear. Something instrumental. Strings. Nothing with words, because words demand attention.

The fume hood breathes on a steady cycle. I’m drawing off a clear amber liquid into vials, each one labeled by hand with a felt-tip pen because machine-printed labels have made me suspicious since I was twelve. The compound is for Raphael, a refinement of a sedative he asked for last week. Fast onset. Soft landing.

The intercom chimes.

“Bench warning,” I say into the air.

“You’re not on the bench, you absolute liar,” Darius says through the speaker. “I can see you on the camera.”

“Did you want something?” I ask.

A pause. I can imagine him smiling at the speaker.

“Nikolai wants everyone in the living room. Twenty minutes.”

I cap the vial in my hand. Set it in the rack.

“Everyone?” I ask.

“Everyone,” he confirms.

“Define everyone.”

“All ten of us. Nine, until you walk your moody chemist self out of that glass box and join the rest of the family.”

“I’m not moody.”

“You’re deeply, profoundly moody, and I love you for it. Twenty minutes,” he finishes.

The speaker clicks off.

I take a slow breath. The fume hood breathes with me. I cap the next three vials, log them in the book—the actual paper book, because paper does not get hacked—and pull off my gloves one finger at a time. The mask waits on its stand by the door. I leave it there. Not for this. Not for my brothers.

I unseal the partition. Step through. The air on the living side smells of the chamomile from last night and the faint trace of something burnt, which means Raphael has been in the kitchen again.

I pull on a hoodie because the corridor between the personal quarters and the common areas runs cooler than the rest of the level, and I hate being cold. I’ve been cold enough for one lifetime.

Darius is leaning against the wall outside my door, scrolling through something on his tablet. He looks up. Grins. He’s wearing a henley with the sleeves shoved up to his elbows, the storm-cloud ink across his forearms catching the corridor light.

“There he is,” he says. “The hermit emerges.”