Page 5 of Dose

“You look thirty and tired.”

I narrow my eyes. “Thank you for the diagnosis.”

Nikolai stands at the head of the planning table, because Nikolai is always already wherever the room is about to gather, arms folded, watching the schematic cycle on the wall display. Jenna is folded into the armchair at his right hand, feet tucked under her, a mug of tea balanced on the curve of her belly.

“Morning, Theon,” she says. “You look like a man who slept in the centrifuge.”

“The centrifuge is more comfortable than it looks.”

Damon walks in last, because Damon is always last on principle. Nikolai waits until the door seals behind him, and then he sweeps the room—a flick of those pale eyes across each of us, an inventory I’ve watched him take a thousand times. Lucien, floor. Ezra, couch corner. Raphael, kitchen. Marcus, doorway. Dominic, table. Damon, by the wall. Darius, beside me. Jenna, at his right hand. Me, present.

“Sit down,” Nikolai says.

We sit. Or we lean. Raphael wipes his hands on a towel and brings a board of sliced fruit to the table, sets it down between Ezra’s tablets, and Ezra inclines his head a fraction of a degree, which from him is effusive gratitude.

“Ashford,” Nikolai says. “Rural Pennsylvania.”

The room goes quiet.

“Confirmed?” Marcus asks.

“Confirmed. Forty-one subjects. Ages four to eleven. The facility went hot eight weeks ago. They’re already into Phase Two with the older ones.”

My hand closes around the edge of the table. I don’t look down at it.

Phase Two. Predator imprinting. Children hunting children.

“Layout?” Damon says.

Ezra rotates one of his tablets. A schematic spreads across the wall display behind him, all clean lines and projected probabilities in the margins. “Three buildings. Central admin and barracks. Eastern wing for conditioning. Western wing for medical and pharmaceutical. Subterranean level beneath the east wing, which I’m modeling as the live-conditioning chambers based on power draw and water usage.”

“Staff?” Nikolai asks.

“Eighty-seven on rotation. Sixty-three armed. Two of the original Project Architect specialists on site. Dr. Vasiliev. Dr. Korte.”

Korte.

The name lands behind my sternum like a struck bell. Korte was Reines’s protégée. Korte ran the chemistry side of two of my early sessions. Korte put a needle in my arm when I was nine and told me to count backward from a hundred in Croatian to see if the language center stayed online while my motor control failed.

I keep my face still, even so Darius’s hand finds the back of my neck and squeezes once. He doesn’t look at me. He doesn’t say anything. He just holds on for a second and then lets go.

“Theon,” Nikolai says. He’s watching me. He sees everything. He always has.

“I’m fine,” I tell him.

“You have Korte.”

“I know.”

“Do you want her?” he asks.

I take a breath. The air in the living room smells like the herbs Raphael was chopping, the coffee Marcus is finishing and the underlying chemical edge that follows me out of the lab no matter how thoroughly I scrub.

“Yes.”

“Then she’s yours.”

Marcus pulls up another window on the wall display. Photographs. Korte at a café near Ashford. Korte at the facility entrance. Korte buying flowers from a roadside stand like she’s a human being.