35. Theon
THEON
The microcentrifuge reaches fourteen thousand times gravity and holds there. I watch the countdown fall through its final twenty seconds while Isla argues with one of Ezra’s old routing models on the tablet beside my elbow.
The tubes contain filtrate from a V-series stabilizer recovered in Idaho last week. Centrifugation will separate the precipitate. It will not tell me whether the remaining compound is stable; that requires chromatography and another twelve hours of thermal testing.
Six months with Isla has not made me less precise. It has given me someone who notices when I am pretending precision can control everything else.
“The western hub’s supplier chain still shows a ghost node,” she says. “Ezra flagged it before he left and never closed the loop.”
“Because Marchant gave him larger ones.”
“Or because she wants us to think the smaller ones are dead.” Isla enlarges a set of freight records. “This is the third closed route this month with one transaction surviving after the parent company disappeared.”
“Send it to Marcus.”
“Already did.”
The centrifuge slows. I wait for the rotor to stop completely before opening the lid.
The six-hour message Ezra promised after Montana arrived eleven minutes late. Its ledger packet was genuine. The northern Indiana site was empty by the time Dominic entered it, and the only useful print belonged to a freight clerk who had been dead for two years.
Ezra did not come home.
He kept transmitting.
At first, every six hours. Then every twelve. Now he checks in twice a week through one-time relays, never long enough for Dominic to reach him. Nikolai stopped calling the operation authorized after the first week. Dominic still calls it recovery. Ezra calls it work.
Marchant remains missing.
The information Ezra sends has nevertheless held up.
It helped investigators and our recovery network close seventeen domestic sites in six months.
Four hundred and twelve children have left Project Architect custody.
We did not personally breach every door, and no building needed to burn.
We found the routes, protected the medication records and put evidence where people with warrants could use it.
Every active facility we have identified remains in the United States. Foreign money still enters the accounts. Foreign manufacturers still sell precursors through intermediaries. None of that has required us to turn this into a war conducted across continents.
The remaining domestic network is smaller, quieter and more difficult to see.
Not gone.
I rack the tubes without disturbing the pellet at the bottom of each one.
“You’re thinking too loudly,” Isla says.
“Scientifically impossible.”
“Emotionally obvious.”
I look at her.
She has built a second workspace at the end of my bench, although she continues to call it temporary.
Her handwritten labels now sit beside mine.
Gwendolyn occupies the reagent shelf. A lavender sachet hangs in our bedroom because fragrances and open flames do not belong in a working laboratory, no matter how persuasive Isla believes herself to be.
The lab still smells like ethanol, clean glass and whatever compound we opened last.
It also feels like ours.
Her tablet gives the three-tone council alert.
“Marcus wants us to review a refrigerated shipment crossing Nevada by Thursday,” she says.
“Remote review?”
One eyebrow rises. “Did the message contain an aircraft ticket I failed to notice?”
“No.”
“Then remote review.”
I return to the samples before concern becomes an argument we have already had. Her field assignments remain mission-specific. So do mine. She is mine when she chooses that word. It does not make me her commander.
Possessiveness is an appetite. It is not a rank.
Ezra calls at 0214 three nights later.
The connection reaches the secure handset through four domestic relays. Encryption flattens his voice until it resembles the filter in his old mask.
I answer before the second ring.
“Status.”
“Mobile. No acute injury. No chemical exposure.” A pause. “Marchant’s Baltimore relay folded Tuesday. Two senior Wager handlers remain unaccounted for.”
“Where are you?”
“Not Baltimore.”
“Dominic will be delighted by the detail.”
“Dominic’s delight has never been a useful planning metric.”
His voice is tired. Not electronically flattened—tired beneath it.
“When did you last sleep?” I ask.
“Recently enough.”
“That is not an answer.”
“It is the one available.”
I sit on the edge of the bed. Isla sleeps beside me, one hand curled near the empty space I left.
“What did you find?”
The silence extends long enough for me to check the connection.
“A subject file,” he says. “Woman. No recovered name. She escaped in 2019 and has moved through six states using stolen identities. Marchant kept the file active.”
“Why?”
“The behavioral markers overlap Wager.”
“That could make her a survivor. It could also make her bait.”
“Yes.”
“You sound interested.”
“I am collecting evidence.”
“You sound interested,” I repeat.
He exhales through his nose. The noise is almost a laugh.
“Isla put protein bars in my original go-bag,” he says. “Tell her they were adequate.”
“Those are six months old.”
“They were sealed.”
“That was not my concern.”
“It should have been. Your concern has poor prioritization.”
There he is. Briefly.
“Call at the next window,” I say.
“I generally do.”
“You missed two last month.”
“Then probability favors improvement.”
“That is not how accountability works.”
The line crackles.
“I have to go.”
“Ezra.”
He waits.
“Coming home remains an option.”
“I know.”
The connection ends.
Isla finds me awake at six.
Her eyes open, locate me in the chair beside the bed and sharpen immediately.
“He called.”
“Baltimore relay is down. Two Wager handlers left. He found the file of a woman who escaped in 2019.”
“Alive?”
“The file remained active. He doesn’t know more yet.”
She sits up and pulls the blanket around her shoulders. “He thinks she’s like him.”
“He thinks some of the markers overlap.”
“Same sentence in Ezra.”
I cannot disagree.
“He sounds further away every time,” I say.
Isla reaches for my hand. She no longer has to think before touching me in the dark.
“We can’t force him home.”
“That does not make what he’s doing safe.”
“No. It means Dominic keeps looking, Raphael keeps asking the questions Ezra hates, and we don’t pretend a check-in is the same as being all right.” Her thumb moves once across my knuckles. “It also means the door stays open.”
“He knows.”
“Good.”
She pulls me back into bed. I go because there is nothing useful I can do at six in the morning that cannot be done with her warm against me.
The recovery liaison forwards Mia’s message at eleven.
Mia is the name she chose after Phoenix. She was ten when we carried the medication records out and eleven by the time her new school enrolled her. Contact remains protected through the clinic; neither her current surname nor her address appears on Isla’s screen.
Isla sees the subject line and stops with a pipette halfway to the rack.
“Put that down first,” I say.
She returns it to the stand without looking away from the tablet.
The note is short.
Miss Isla,
Dr. Halloran said I could write if I wanted.
My blood tests were in the target range again.
I started school and made a friend named Priya.
She likes horses too. I asked what my medicine was for, like you told me I could, and Dr. Halloran explained every part before she touched me.
I was still scared, but I did it anyway.
Thank you for helping us leave.
Mia
Isla reads it twice.
“She asked,” she says.
“Yes.”
“And the doctor answered her.”
“Yes.”
Her hand begins to shake around the tablet. I take the instrument before she drops it, set it safely on the bench and wait.
“I need to update her record.”
“The clinic already entered the blood results. You can add the correspondence after lunch.”
“I want to do it now.”
“I know.” I hold out my hand. “Come upstairs anyway.”
She looks at the open message, then at me.
“Forty minutes,” she says.
“Agreed.”
She takes my hand.
Henrietta occupies the same place in the common room she did the first day Isla met the family. Six months of councils, meals and arguments have not improved the couch’s appearance.
It remains Henrietta.
“Darius suggested reupholstering her,” Isla says as she curls into my side.
“She needs it.”
“That is not the point.”
“What is the point?”
“Loyalty.”
“To damaged furniture.”
“You’ve built a life around that principle.”
I look at her.
She smiles for the first time since opening Mia’s message.
Upstairs, Jenna’s baby begins to cry. The sound comes faintly through the monitor on the table.
Nikolai appears in the doorway less than five seconds later, already moving toward the stairs.
Darius shouts from the kitchen that running will not make the bottle warm faster.
Damon tells him to stop shouting near the monitor.
The house has changed shape around one very small person.
Isla rests her head against my chest.
“Mia made a friend,” she says.
“Priya. Horses.”
“You listened.”
“I always listen.”
“You also catalogue.”
“Only important things.”
Her fingers lace through mine.
“At Site Nine, choices were questions with one permitted answer,” she says. “Here, people tell me no. I argue. Sometimes they’re right. Sometimes I am. Then the door still opens.”
“And you stay.”
“Because I want to.” She turns her face toward mine. “I still want to be yours. That hasn’t become less true because Korte used it against me.”
The claim moves through me with the same force it always has.
“You are mine,” I say. “For exactly as long as you keep choosing it.”
“Every day so far.”
I kiss her slowly. There is no emergency in the contact, no need to prove either of us survived. Her hand closes in my shirt and holds me where she wants me.
Her tablet chimes on the low table.
Both of us stop.
Isla reaches it first.
The message is signed with Ezra’s current one-time key.
FOUND THE WOMAN FROM THE FILE. ALIVE. SHE KNOWS MARCHANT. DO NOT FOLLOW THIS RELAY. NEXT WINDOW 0600. —E
I check the time. The next window is at oh-six-hundred.
“He found her,” Isla says.
“Or she found him.”
“We tell Nikolai.”
“Already forwarded.”
Another notification confirms Marcus has received it. A third says Dominic is moving on the visible relay even though all of us know it may be another empty room.
Isla sets the tablet down.
We do not say Ezra will be fine. We do not say he always comes back. Neither statement is ours to guarantee.
Mia is alive and asking questions. Seventeen sites are closed. Korte is dead. Marchant is not. Ezra owes us his next contact at oh-six-hundred, and the program still has people we have not found.
Isla takes my hand again.
She is here because she wants to be.
For today, that is the fact I trust.
Thank for reading Dose. I hope you enjoyed Isla & Theon’s story.
What’s next?
I don’t yet have a date for the next book, due to personal setbacks in my life, but here’s a sneak peek at the blurb and cover.
I’ve had seven names in six years.
None of them was mine.
Project Architect taught me how to lie without changing my pulse, disappear before anyone noticed me and become whoever a mission required. Marchant gave me those skills. She gave me freedom—or something convincing enough to pass for it.
Then Ezra Bishop found me.
He’s one of the original escaped subjects. The mind Marchant built the Wager Protocol around. A man who can pull apart a lie before it finishes leaving my mouth.
I should have been gone before he arrived.
I was waiting instead.
Ezra thinks I can lead him to Marchant. He’s right.
He thinks I might be bait.
He’s right about that too.
What he doesn’t know is that I remember his voice. It came through the walls when we were children, telling me which choices might keep us alive. Sometimes it was really him. Sometimes it was a recording Marchant used to control me.
I stopped trying to tell the difference years ago.
Now Ezra follows me from one stolen identity to the next, searching my rooms, breaking into my devices, and watching for the moment I turn on him. He demands the truth while hiding from his family and pretends his interest in me is merely another investigation.
He’s lying.
I feel it when he corners me after catching me in another deception. When his control finally fractures and his hands close around me. When he tells me to stop running as though he has already decided I belong to him.
I was trained to make men like Ezra lose control.
I wasn’t trained to want what happens when he does.
Marchant designed Wager around one simple principle: give someone another person to love, and you give them a weakness that can be exploited.
Ezra believes he came to find me.
He doesn’t understand that I was placed in his path.
I am the answer he has been searching for.
I am the trap waiting at the end of it.
And I’m no longer certain I want him to escape.