4. Theon
THEON
Day three, and the benzodiazepine analogue refuses to hold its ring structure above forty degrees Celsius.
I adjust the water bath by half a degree and watch the solution through the glass.
Pale amber. It should be clearer than this.
I've been losing this compound for three years—reagent grade, buffer strength, the ring structure itself.
I've rebuilt every variable I can name, and it still comes apart on me a few degrees too soon.
The one thing I never audit is my own hand.
Korte was the one who rushed, who trusted a compound to forgive her impatience; I learned the opposite lesson watching her fail.
I remember the taste of those failures. Metallic, with a burn at the back of the throat that lingered for days.
Count backward. Ten. Nine. Croatian, because she wanted to know whether the compound degraded language retrieval before motor function or after. I made it to four before my legs stopped answering. She wrote the number down and smiled like I’d given her a gift.
The memory arrives, deposits its data, and leaves. I’ve learned not to fight the arrivals. Fighting costs energy, and I have none to spare this week.
I pull the flask from the bath and label it:
V-SERIES REVERSAL, BATCH 2, INCOMPLETE.
Beside it sit eleven other flasks in various states of progress, each one an answer to a question Korte asked with children’s bodies twenty years ago.
The intelligence Marcus pulled from the Ashford procurement records tells me what she’s ordering.
Precursors for compliance agents. Dissociative maintenance doses.
A cholinergic blocker I recognize because she tested its grandfather on me when I was seven, and I spent three days unable to close my left hand.
Forty-one children in that facility. Some of them have my old dosing schedule running through their veins right now, this minute, while I stand in a warm lab drinking tea that’s gone cold.
I make fresh tea. The ritual matters more than the caffeine.
The door sensor chimes at nine forty. Raphael. I know before the door opens because he’s the only one who waits the full three seconds after the chime, giving me time to cap anything volatile. The others assume my ventilation handles it. Raphael assumes nothing.
“Your sedative,” I tell him, nodding toward the transport case on the end bench. “Twelve doses. Onset in ninety seconds intramuscular, four minutes transdermal. Reversal agent is in the red vials. Don’t confuse them.”
“When have I ever confused them?” he asks.
“Never. Which is why you keep receiving them.”
He crosses to the bench and opens the case, checking each vial against the light.
His inspection isn’t distrust. It’s the same habit that lives in my own hands—the understanding that a single mislabeled vial can end everything.
He grew up under different knives than mine, but the knives taught us the same lessons.
“The children.” He closes the case. “Nikolai says some of them might be older and fight us. Conditioned loyalty.”
“Possible. Korte layers a dependency compound into the daily regimen. Withdrawal presents as panic within six hours, so the children associate their handlers with relief. They’ll defend the people hurting them because their own neurochemistry insists on it.”
“Can you break it?” Raphael presses.
“I can taper it. Breaking it fast causes seizures.” I gesture at the far bench, where forty-one small dosing kits sit in ordered rows, each one weighed and sealed.
“Six-week protocols. Individualized once I get their bloodwork. It won’t undo what’s been done.
It gives their bodies back, that’s all.”
Raphael studies the rows for a long moment. Beneath the ink on his forearm, a section of the biomechanical pattern sits slightly raised, inflamed. A pathway starting to fail. I’ve already synthesized his next round of stabilizers; they’re curing in the cold room.
“That’s more than anyone gave us,” he says, and takes the case, and goes.
The lab settles back into its hum. I return to the reversal agent and start the third batch with a fresh reagent lot, certain the fault lies somewhere upstream of my own hands, and for two hours the work is clean and wordless and mine.
Jesi li ?edan, C-08? Are you thirsty? She asked that after every trial, holding the water where I could see it, waiting to log how long pride survived against thirst. Forty minutes, the first time.
Nine minutes by the end of the year. She graphed my surrender.
I found the graph in the seized files after we escaped, my own breaking rendered as a descending curve, annotated in her small, square handwriting.
I take my midday injection at twelve exactly.
The auto-injector hisses against the outside of my thigh and the familiar warmth spreads through my chest—my custom cocktail correcting the imbalances two decades of exposure carved into me.
Korte’s colleagues built a body that cannot survive without their damage being managed daily.
There’s a word for that kind of authorship, but I don’t let myself reach for it while I’m working.
Darius arrives without a chime because he disabled it months ago and I’ve never bothered to fix it. He drapes himself against the doorframe, ash-blond hair falling wherever it pleases, holding two protein bars like they’re contraband.
“You’ve been in here nineteen hours.”
“Sixteen. I slept.”
“You lay down in the cold room for forty minutes next to a curing rack. Marcus heard your heartbeat through the wall and made me come check you weren’t dead.”
“The cold room is quiet.”
“The cold room is four degrees Celsius, you absolute lunatic.” He lobs a protein bar at me.
I catch it without looking, which pleases him; I catch the flicker of satisfaction before he decides to show it to me.
With Darius, every expression is a decision.
“Eat. Nikolai’s rule, not mine. I’m just the delivery system. ”
I unwrap the bar. Chalk and synthetic vanilla. I eat it anyway, because he’ll stand there until I do, and because somewhere under the theater he’s counting my calories the way he counts everyone’s tells.
“The Korte woman,” he says, lighter than the words deserve. “You want her conscious or unconscious when you find her?”
“Conscious.”
“Thought so. You go very still when her name comes up. Very informative.” He taps his own temple. “Just checking you know what you want. People who don’t know what they want improvise. Improvisation gets brothers shot.”
“I’ve known what I want for twenty-two years.”
“Good.” He pushes off the doorframe. “Then eat the second bar too. Vengeance runs on glucose.”
He leaves the second bar on the bench beside the dosing kits, exactly where I’ll have to move it, exactly where I can’t ignore it. Darius can make concern look like a joke and a joke look like an order. I move it, eat half of it, and go back to work.
The afternoon belongs to the incapacitants.
Nikolai wants the facility’s security staff down without fatalities where possible—dead guards raise pursuit priority, and we need eleven quiet days across four states.
I’ve built an aerosol that drops a grown man in under a minute and leaves him with a headache and a gap in his memory.
The gap is deliberate. Witnesses who can’t sequence events give investigators nothing to build on.
I’m calibrating dispersal volumes for the corridor dimensions in the facility blueprints when Marcus knocks. He actually knocks, knuckles on the frame, though he could have identified everything happening in this room from the residential level by scent alone.
“Movement update on Ashford.” Marcus steps inside, mask off, blue eyes tracking every open flask before they land on me.
His pupils sit uneven, one wider than the other, which means he’s been running his hearing hard all morning.
“Procurement flagged a personnel transfer last night. Inbound, not outbound.”
“Staff rotation?”
“No. A specialist.” He sets a tablet on the clear end of my bench, careful to keep it away from the reversal batches. “Kessler signed the transfer order out of a site we haven’t mapped yet. Site Nine. The specialist landed in Ashford at oh-six-hundred local. Korte requested her by name.”
I dry my hands and pick up the tablet. The intercepted manifest is thin—flight logs, a supply requisition, a personnel code rather than a name. S-C-P dash something. The requisition list underneath it is not thin at all, and I read it twice because the first read seems wrong.
“She ordered analytical standards,” I say. “Reference-grade. Full chromatography consumables. Stability-testing reagents.”
“Meaning what?”
“Meaning Korte brought in someone to audit the stockpile and rebuild the synthesis protocols.” I scroll further. Cold-chain packaging. Validation columns. The shopping list of a careful chemist, not a butcher. “They know someone’s coming. They’re hardening the chemistry before we arrive.”
Marcus leans against the bench, arms crossed, and I watch him filter the room—the centrifuge’s bearing wobble he’ll mention to me next week, the faint bitterness off batch three that tells him it’s failing before my assay will. “Does it change your extraction plan?”
“It changes my timeline inside the lab wing. An audited stockpile means new inventory seals, new access logs. I’ll need eight extra minutes to pull samples without leaving a footprint.
” I hand the tablet back. “It also means there will be a second chemist in that building. Competent enough that Korte asked for her.”
“Nikolai wants to know if she goes on a list.”
The question sits between us, ordinary as the hum of the fume hood. Twenty years ago, someone stood in a corridor and decided which children were assets and which were disposal. The decision took them seconds. I make myself take longer.
“I don’t have enough data,” I say. “Someone who orders reference standards documents everything. Documentation is either complicity or evidence, depending on what she does when the doors come open.”
“That’s not an answer.”
“It’s the only honest one I have. Tell Nikolai she’s an unknown, not a target. Not yet.”
Marcus watches me for a moment longer than necessary. His nostrils flare once, and I know he’s reading my cortisol as plainly as I read a titration curve. Whatever he finds, he keeps it to himself.
“Eight extra minutes,” he says. “I’ll tell him. He won’t like it.”
“He’d like contaminated samples less.”
He collects the tablet and pauses at the door. “Batch three is off, by the way. Smells like acetone and regret.”
“I know.”
“Sleep in your actual bed tonight, Theon. The cold room makes your blood sound strange.”
Then he’s gone, and the lab is mine again, and I stand very still beside the failing batch.
A specialist Korte requested by name. Twenty-two years ago, that request would have carried a subject number.
Send me C-08. He tolerates the aerosols.
Somewhere in Ashford tonight, a woman is unpacking validation columns into a laboratory two floors below forty-one dosed children, and I don’t yet know whether she’s another Korte or another me.
I pour batch three down the neutralization drain and start again, changing everything.
Either way, I’ll find out in eight days.