Dose (The Architects #2)

1. Theon

THEON

Bitter almonds. Wet copper. The faint, sweet rot of acetone burning through my nostrils until the inside of my skull feels scraped raw. My six-year-old body knows that scent before my mind can name it. Cyanide derivative. Sublethal. Documentation grade.

I’m strapped to the chair again.

The leather cuffs cut into my wrists, and my feet don’t reach the floor.

They never reach the floor. I remember that detail like most people remember the color of their mother’s eyes, except I don’t remember my mother’s eyes at all.

I remember the chair. The cold steel armrest where my forearm rests, palm up, the inside of my elbow exposed like an offering.

Dr. Halvorsen leans over me. White coat.

Wire-frame glasses. A pen tucked behind one ear, the cap chewed to soft plastic.

He has kind eyes. That’s the part that breaks me, even now, in a bed in Chicago.

He has kind eyes, and he is going to hurt me again, and he is going to write down what happens while I scream.

“Subject C-08, session forty-seven,” he says into the recorder. “Compound designation A-9. Twelve milligrams, intravenous. Proceed.”

The needle goes in.

I’ve learned not to flinch. Flinching means starting over. Starting over means another dose, and another dose means my small body metabolizing twice the load, convulsions that last longer than it takes Halvorsen to finish his coffee.

So I don’t flinch.

The compound climbs my arm like a living thing. Cold first, then warm, then a heat that isn’t heat at all—every nerve in my body burning at once. My jaw locks. My tongue swells against my teeth. Somewhere behind my eyes, a white light flares.

“Observe pupillary response,” Halvorsen murmurs. A penlight clicks on and floods my eyes. “Dilation within expected parameters. Vocalization?”

I cannot vocalize. My throat has forgotten how.

“Note: vocalization suppressed at this dosage. Previous threshold exceeded. Adjust baseline.”

He writes it down. I can hear the pen scratching. In the dream, the scratching is louder than my heartbeat, louder than the wet click my throat makes as it tries to remember how to swallow.

A second voice. Female. Dr. Reines. She smells like lavender soap, and for years afterward, I cannot walk through a hotel lobby without my stomach turning over.

“He’s seizing, Mark.”

“Within tolerance. Continue documentation.”

“He’s six.”

“He’s Subject C-08. Continue documentation, or I’ll note your hesitation in the file.”

There’s a pause, and then the scratch of her pen joining his. Two pens now. Two adults write down what my body does while I seize, and not one of them reaches for the antidote sitting on the tray three feet away.

The convulsions come.

In the dream, they come more slowly, drawn out like film slipping from the reel. My spine arches, and I feel each vertebra grind. My teeth break the inside of my lip, and blood runs down my chin.

Halvorsen leans closer. Adjusts his glasses. “Lacrimation present. Note bilateral. Salivation is excessive. Increase suction.”

Something cold slides into the corner of my mouth. The wet sucking sound joins the scratching pens, joins my own gargled breathing, and the three sounds braid together into music that lives in my brain forever.

“Theon.”

He uses my name. He never uses my name during sessions. My name in his mouth sharpens the dream into something I cannot escape by waking.

“Theon, can you tell me what you smell?”

I am six years old. I am dying.

“Bit—” My tongue won’t shape it. “Bitter. Almond.”

“Good boy.” He smiles at me. “And the secondary note?”

“Acet—acetone. Trace. Burned.”

“Excellent.” The pen scratches. “Memory retention under acute neurotoxic stress remains exceptional. Subject continues to outperform protocol expectations.”

Reines turns away. Her shoulders shake once. Just once. Then she straightens, clears her throat, and reaches for the next syringe on the tray.

“Compound B-14,” she says, and her voice is level again. “For comparative response.”

“No,” I try to say. “Please.”

The word comes out as bubbles.

I wake the way I always wake.

Not screaming. Screaming is for people who weren’t raised inside the nightmare.

I wake with my eyes already open, my breath measured in four-count intervals, my pulse already climbing.

One-twenty. Elevated. Cortisol spike consistent with REM termination during phase-three recall. Expected. Manageable.

The ceiling above my bed is matte black, sound-dampening foam cut into geometric panels.

I painted it that color myself when we first carved out this place beneath the cold-storage facility on the South Side.

The original ceiling had been white. White like Halvorsen’s coat.

White like the tile in the documentation rooms. I couldn’t sleep beneath white.

Filtered air whispers through the vents at precise intervals, scrubbed clean of anything my lungs might recognize as a threat.

The system screens for forty-seven separate compounds.

I designed the array myself. Overkill, the others say.

The others have not woken at three in the morning convinced they could taste B-14 on the back of their tongue.

My hand finds the bedside drawer without my eyes leaving the ceiling. The contents are arranged the way they have been every night for many years. Three prefilled auto-injectors, left to right, by dosing time. A small glass of water, poured fresh each evening before I sleep.

I sit up.

The sheet falls to my hips, and the cold of the room finds the ink on my chest. Sixty-seven degrees Fahrenheit. I keep it cool because cool slows reactions, slows metabolism, slows the part of my brain that still believes it’s six years old and strapped to a chair.

The injector goes against the outside of my thigh. I chose the site deliberately, years ago. Halvorsen used my veins to put poison in. I use my own hands, my own formula and a place he never touched to put myself back together.

Click. Hiss.

The cocktail moves through my veins the way A-9 moved through me in the dream, except this one is mine. I synthesized it. I titrated it. I know its half-life down to the second. Warmth spreads through my chest, finds the ragged edges of my nervous system, and smooths them.

I exhale, dropping the used injector into the sharps container beside the bed and sliding the drawer shut.

Somewhere above me, the facility hums. The compressors that used to chill meat lockers now cool our servers, our labs, and the medical wing where Lucien still has a bed warmed for him on bad nights.

The hum is constant. A change in pitch means a temperature shift in the east stacks.

A long, sustained note means everyone is asleep.

Right now there’s a long, sustained note.

I swing my legs out of bed. The floor is heated, which is the one concession I make to comfort. My feet meet warmth, and my body relaxes a little.

The wardrobe opens with a soft pneumatic hiss.

I pull on a pair of black trousers and a black T-shirt.

Bare feet. I don’t bother with my mask. The mask is for fieldwork, strangers and anyone whose face I need to read without offering my own.

Alone, at three in the morning, in my own quarters, I let my face exist.

It’s not a face I’m fond of. The mirror across the room shows me what Halvorsen built.

Sharp jaw. Bronze skin. Ice-blue eyes that I find difficult to meet.

The longer side of my hair has fallen across my cheek, and beneath it, the temple scar catches the low light.

Procedure twelve. They had to go in to recalibrate a monitor that had migrated against the bone. I was eleven.

I push the hair back. Let myself look. Look away.

I switch on the kettle in the corner. Coffee would push my heart rate up again, and I’ve only just brought it down. I keep a tin of something Darius blended for me last winter: chamomile, skullcap, and a third ingredient he refuses to tell me. It tastes like a forest floor.

While the water heats, I cross to the lab side of my quarters.

The partition between living space and workspace is sealed glass with its own air handling.

On the other side, the centrifuge display shows that the run I started before bed completed without an error.

Whatever Raphael needs for tomorrow’s session at Threshold will be ready by morning.

I tap the glass once with my knuckle, a small acknowledgment, and turn back.

The kettle clicks off.

I pour and then wrap my hands around the cup. I stand at the narrow viewport that looks out into the corridor, where the night lights glow a dim amber I chose because it does not resemble laboratory white at any wavelength.

Halvorsen is dead.

I remind myself of this. I remind myself often.

He died on a Tuesday in March, two years ago, in a hotel room in New York.

The coroner ruled that it was a sudden cardiac event in a sixty-eight-year-old man with a family history of heart disease.

The compound I designed mimicked the metabolites of his own stress hormones.

It left nothing behind. He died alone. He died confused.

He died—Marcus watched the surveillance—reaching for a glass of water three feet away on the bedside table.

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.