7. Isla
ISLA
The mass spectrometer is called Vladimir.
He earned the name on day two, when he threw an error code at me for no reason and then pretended nothing had happened, which struck me as a very Vladimir thing to do.
Since then, we’ve reached an understanding.
I feed him samples, he tells me their secrets, and neither of us mentions the error code.
Healthy relationships are built on selective amnesia.
I would know. I’ve built my entire personality on it.
It’s day six of the audit, and I’m working through cabinet fourteen of twenty-two. I pull the next vial from its climate-controlled nest and hold it up to the light. The liquid is a pale gold, almost pretty.
D-40 is a dissociative maintenance compound administered orally in the morning nutrition ration.
It takes effect in twenty minutes, making sure that whatever happens to a child during the day reaches their brain slightly out of focus, like watching their own life through a rain-streaked window.
The child still performs and complies but is never entirely present for it.
I know the compound intimately—not because I designed it, but because I took it from ages seven through eleven. I can still summon the texture of those years if I’m foolish enough to try: days smeared together, faces without edges, my own hands at the ends of my arms like borrowed equipment.
I log the batch number and run the purity assay. Ninety-nine point two percent.
“Excellent work, whoever made you,” I tell the vial. “You’re a triumph. I hope your creator steps on glass every morning for the rest of their life.”
Vladimir hums. He agrees with me about everything, which is why he’s my second-favorite colleague. First place belongs to the corridor window.
The window is on the first sublevel, at the top of the stairwell I use to deliver my daily reports, and it shouldn’t exist. Someone made an architectural error forty years ago, back when this building actually studied soil, and left a slit of glass near the ceiling where the stairwell meets ground level.
It’s maybe thirty centimeters wide, reinforced and filthy, but at eleven forty each morning, if the sky cooperates, it lets in a blade of sunlight that lands on the seventh stair.
I’ve started timing my report deliveries for eleven forty.
This is not rebellion. I want to be clear about that, in case the part of my brain that files reports on the rest of me is listening. Standing in sunlight for thirty seconds is thermoregulation. Vitamin D synthesis. A specialist maintaining optimal function.
It’s mine, is what it is. Like the rainbow was mine. I’m assembling a very small museum of things that belong to me, and the whole collection fits inside a patch of light on a stair.
Today, the sky cooperates. I stand on the seventh stair with Korte’s interim report under my arm, close my eyes, and count to thirty by primes: two, three, five, seven, eleven, thirteen, seventeen, nineteen, twenty-three, twenty-nine. Sunlight warms my face without asking what I do for a living.
Then I climb the rest of the stairs and go back to work, because the sun forgives everyone. That’s its whole flaw as a system.
The children move through this building like weather. I don’t see them often, but I register their effects.
Between fourteen hundred and fifteen hundred, muted voices travel through the ventilation shaft above cabinet nine.
The words are too blurred to catch, but the cadence is unmistakable: call and response, small voices repeating something in unison until they get it right.
In the evenings, I hear soft-soled footsteps overhead—forty-one pairs of shoes designed to make no sound, which means I hear them everywhere.
On day four, I saw one of the children up close.
I was delivering the stockpile verification to Korte’s office when a handler came down the east corridor, steering a girl by the shoulder. She was nine, maybe ten, and fresh from a session. Her face had the blankness that comes afterward, everything pulled inward and out of reach.
I know that look. I learned it in another facility, in another decade. Give children the same predators, and they learn the same stillness.
She didn’t look at me. She’s not allowed to look at anyone. But as they passed, her hand twitched at her side, fingers spreading and closing, and I recognized what she was doing. She was counting her steps, using the one measure still available to her.
I wanted to tell her, Hello. I see you. I have a centrifuge named Beatrice and a window that makes rainbows, and someday you’ll build a museum too.
I said none of it.
I delivered my report, and Korte was pleased. Korte is always pleased with me.
I don’t know what to do with that.
On day eight, Korte comes down to review the chromatography results herself.
“Your predecessor,” she says, studying them with an attention that borders on affection, “would have taken three weeks to accomplish this. You’ve restructured the entire verification framework in eight days.”
“The original framework had redundancies. I removed them.”
“You did more than that.” She sets the tablet down and looks at me over the steel frames.
We’re in my lab, and she’s holding a cup of tea she brought with her because she doesn’t consume anything prepared below ground level.
Even her thirst has security protocols. “The new inventory seals. The dual-log access system. The tracer dilutions in the reserve stocks. If anyone touches this stockpile now, we’ll know within four hours which cabinet, which compound, which glove size. ”
“That was the assignment, Doctor.”
“It was. And you’ve done it beautifully.” She sips her tea. “Do you know what C-08 will find if he comes? A locked house. Every window wired. Every door alarmed. You’ve built me a fortress, Summer.”
I’ve built her a fortress. Inside it, forty-one children take my compounds with their morning rations. The better I am at my work, the harder those walls become to breach. That’s the joke at the center of everything: the program made me excellent, and my excellence protects it.
“The subjects benefit as well,” Korte adds, in the tone of a woman remembering to mention the weather. “Verified purity means predictable dosing. Predictable dosing means fewer adverse events during behavioral installation. You’ve improved their welfare, in a sense.”
The pressure behind my sternum pounds hard enough to hurt. My face doesn’t move.
“In a sense,” I agree.
I imagine picking up the flask of D-40 concentrate on the bench between us and throwing it in her face.
I imagine contaminating every cabinet with something slow and subtle.
I could design the compound, vector, and timeline in under a minute.
I’ve already designed eleven versions. I know because I counted.
Still, I keep measuring. I keep saying, “Understood, Doctor,” and all eleven sabotages remain imaginary. Conditioning isn’t a cage I can point to. It’s the floor under my feet, and I don’t know how to stand without it.
“Final report tomorrow morning,” Korte says, collecting her tea. “Then I imagine Kessler will want you back. Unless.” She pauses at the door. “I’ve considered requesting a permanent transfer. Your profile suits this facility.”
The door seals behind her before I have to answer, which is the closest thing to mercy she’s ever shown anyone.
The audit isn’t the only inventory I’ve been keeping.
The guard on the sublevel night rotation is named Pavel, according to his badge, and he is merely indifferent, which in this place qualifies him for sainthood.
The day guard, Yeronin, is not indifferent.
On day five, I watched him stop a boy in the corridor and make him stand facing the wall for eleven minutes because he was walking too slowly.
Yeronin smiled the whole time. I added him to a list I’m keeping in my head.
I don’t know what the list is for. It’s just a list: cruel guards, indifferent guards, camera positions, which stairwell doors require a badge in both directions and which only require one, the fire-suppression layout, the ventilation trunk routes, and the fact that the dormitory wing’s air handling connects to the east stack.
The east stack’s maintenance hatch has a broken sensor no one has logged.
An auditor audits. I’ve simply audited more of the building than the assignment required. If anyone asks, thoroughness is in my profile. It’s why I was requested by name.
I’m not planning anything. I’m observing. Observing is what I’m for.
But I observe like a woman memorizing a house she may someday need to escape from—or burn—and I’ve stopped pretending I don’t know the difference.
The night before I present my final report, I can’t sleep.
My quarters on the sublevel are a gray box with a bed, a desk, and no window, not even a slit left by architectural error.
I lie on top of the blanket, fully dressed because undressing in this building feels like a concession, and go through the documentation once more on the tablet balanced against my knees.
It’s perfect. Of course it is. Two hundred and six pages of verified purity, hardened protocols, and access alarms. Every compound accounted for.
Every synthesis route optimized. Tomorrow, I hand Korte her fortress.
After that, I may fly back to the Terrarium, where the rainbow will hit my floor at six forty and I’ll stand in it while forty-one children continue taking my chemistry with breakfast in a building I made stronger.
I set the tablet down. The ceiling has one hundred and forty-four panels. Twelve squared. I’ve counted them every night for eight nights, hoping the math will do what it has always done for me and fill the space where feelings would otherwise go.
Tonight, the math doesn’t hold.
The feeling behind my sternum knocks slowly and steadily. For nine days, since Kessler said the word Ashford, I’ve stood on the other side of that door with my hand on the lock, saying, Not now. Not here. There’s nowhere for you to go.
Tonight, I stop saying it.
I think about the girl with the counting fingers, Yeronin’s smile, and the seventh stair.
I think about Korte calling the children properly installed.
Then I think about the museum of things that are mine: a rainbow, a name for a centrifuge, thirty seconds of stolen sun.
Eleven years, and everything I own would fit inside a shoebox.
I let myself finish a thought I’ve been cutting off for eighteen years. I let it reach the end.
I wish someone would burn this place to the ground.
There. Done. No record except me.
Nothing happens. No alarm sounds. The ceiling keeps its one hundred and forty-four panels. My heart keeps beating, and somewhere above me, forty-one children breathe their engineered sleep. The world does not end because I wished for a match.
The knocking goes quiet. Not gone. Quiet. The way you go quiet when the person on the other side of the door finally says, I know. I hear you. Soon.
I close my eyes.
Tomorrow, I present the report.