HER

  The crystallization point hit at 4:47 a.m., which meant I’d been standing over this hot plate in a condemned building for the better part of two days, inhaling solvent fumes and running on gas-station espresso and the kind of spite that probably qualified as a personality disorder.

  The compound cleared. Milky to amber in the space of a breath, like watching a bruise heal in reverse.

  I didn’t celebrate. I wrote down the temperature. I wrote down the time. I labeled the beaker with a strip of masking tape and a Sharpie because I’d stopped being able to afford proper lab labels about seven aliases ago, and then I sat down on the kitchen floor of someone else’s abandoned life and pressed the heels of my hands into my eye sockets until I saw colors that didn’t exist.

  Two hundred milliliters. That’s what three years of running, hiding, and slowly losing my mind had produced. Two hundred milliliters of a liquid that might be the most important substance on the planet, or might be an elaborate placebo that I’d wasted the last thirty-one hours of my life cooking while a pharmaceutical death squad closed in on my location.

  Fun times. Really living the dream.

  The tablet on the counter—cracked screen, prepaid data, no GPS because I’m paranoid, not stupid—was auto-playing a news segment I’d flagged. I could hear it through the tinny speakers even with my palms mashed against my face. A man’s voice, polished smooth as pharmaceutical glass, delivering words that made my blood pressure do something medically inadvisable.

  “—thrilled to announce that the Lycaon Group’s Somatic Wellness Division has achieved a significant breakthrough in the management of rare dermatological and photosensitive conditions. Our proprietary protocol represents a paradigm shift in patient-centered care—”

  I dropped my hands and looked at the screen.

  The spokesman was exactly the type. Mid-forties, jaw engineered in a boardroom, wearing a lab coat over a suit that cost more than six months of my rent back when I still had a name and an address and a life that didn’t involve cooking black-market pharmaceuticals in condemned buildings. The Lycaon Group logo glowed behind him in soft teal and white. Wellness colors. Trust-me-I’m-a-doctor colors.

  Patient-centered care.

  My brother had been a patient.

  Right up until he wasn’t.

  I turned the tablet off. The silence that followed was the particular silence of a building that had been empty long enough to forget what people sounded like—the kind of quiet that presses against your eardrums and makes you aware of your own breathing, your own heartbeat, the small wet sounds of being alive in a space that had stopped expecting life.

  Water stains on the ceiling. A disconnected gas line I’d capped with epoxy and a prayer. The smell of chemical solvents layered over mold layered over the ghost of someone’s cooking from years ago—cumin, maybe. Garlic. A family that used to eat dinner here before I converted their kitchen into a drug lab and put a sharps container where the fruit bowl probably sat.

  I’m a great houseguest. Really. A delight.

  I stood up. My knees cracked like bubble wrap. My lower back staged a formal protest, which I overruled on the grounds that my lower back could file its complaints with the rest of my body—also falling apart—and we’d schedule a group therapy session when we weren’t being hunted by a pharmaceutical conglomerate that had already murdered the only family I had left.

  The compound needed two hours to cool before I could run stability tests. Two hours I should spend sleeping, eating, performing any of the basic biological maintenance that kept a human body from collapsing—the equivalent of changing the oil in a car I’d been driving with every warning light on for three years straight.

  Instead, I checked the perimeter. Because of course I did.

  Three cameras. One on the front entrance—a steel door I’d reinforced with a deadbolt and a chain that would buy me maybe forty-five seconds if someone came through it with intent. One on the alley access, which was blocked by a dumpster I’d repositioned using a car jack, a two-by-four, and a vocabulary that would have made Tobias raise both eyebrows. One on the fire escape, which was rusted enough to announce anyone’s approach with the subtlety of a car alarm having a nervous breakdown.

  Reading on Amazon or a pirate site? This novel is from Royal Road. Support the author by reading it there.

  I cycled through the feeds on the laptop. Alley: empty. Fire escape: empty. Front entrance—

  A cat. Sitting on the stoop, cleaning its paw with the serene indifference of a creature that had never once been hunted by anyone with a corporate budget and a taste for euphemism.

  “Lucky bastard,” I told the cat.

  The cat did not respond. Good. I was at the stage of sleep deprivation where the cat responding would not have struck me as unusual, and I needed to stay on the functional side of that line for at least two more hours.

  I checked the burner phone. No messages. There were never messages. The only person who had this number was a woman I’d met once, in a parking garage in Baltimore, who had handed me a USB drive full of stolen Lycaon Group internal memos and told me—with the flat calm of someone who had already made peace with the worst—that I had maybe six months before they found me.

  That was five months ago.

  I looked at the beaker. The amber liquid sat perfectly still, perfectly clear, catching the light from the single working bulb like something precious. Like something that could save a life or end one, depending on the dose and the context and whether I’d gotten the molecular chirality right or spent thirty-one hours cooking a very expensive glass of nothing.

  My brother would have known. Tobias would have leaned over my shoulder, tapping the readout with a pen he’d chewed to splinters, and told me—in that insufferable, patient, older-brother way of his—that the enantiomer was wrong, or that the binding affinity was off by a decimal, or that I was brilliant and exhausted and needed to eat something that wasn’t caffeine and rage.

  Tobias was three years dead.

  Officially: cardiac arrest. Quietly, in the night, in a Lycaon Group facility, at the age of thirty-four. A tragedy. These things happen.

  Unofficially—and I use the word loosely, because nothing about the Lycaon Group is official, that’s rather the point—he was disposed of. That’s the word they use. Disposed of. Like he was medical waste. Like he was a syringe that had served its purpose and could now be dropped into the sharps bin and incinerated.

  He’d tried to destroy his own research. He’d figured out what they intended to use it for, and instead of handing it over like a good little company man, he’d tried to burn it. All of it. Every file, every formula, every note.

  He almost succeeded.

  Almost.

  I have his notebook. The real one—not the sanitized version they keep in their archives. A Moleskine with an elastic band and pages warped from coffee he spilled in a lab that no longer exists. His handwriting starts precise and deteriorates toward the end, the letters getting larger, looser, the pen pressing harder into the paper like he was running out of time and trying to carve the words deep enough that someone would find them.

  Someone did. Me.

  The last entry is four words long. I don’t read the last entry. I know what it says. I don’t need to see his handwriting shaking while he wrote it.

  I poured the last of the cold coffee into my mug. It was terrible. I drank it anyway, because the alternative was sleeping, and sleeping meant dreaming, and dreaming meant Tobias, and Tobias meant the notebook, and the notebook meant the last four words, and I was not doing that tonight.

  Tonight I had a compound to stabilize. Tonight I had work. Tonight I was Dr. Maren Vosse—toxicologist, pharmaceutical chemist, fugitive, and sole surviving heir to a dead man’s formula that could either save the world or arm it.

  The building creaked around me, settling in its joints the way old buildings do, like a body turning over in sleep. The cat on the stoop washed its face. The compound cooled.

  I did not know, standing in that kitchen at 4:47 a.m. on a Tuesday in March, that I had approximately nineteen hours left as a free woman.

  I did not know that the Lycaon Group had already dispatched their solution to the problem of me, and that their solution was six-foot-two, ran a core temperature three degrees above baseline human, and was currently losing a fight with his own biology in the back of an armored transport van fourteen miles from my front door.

  I did not know that the most dangerous man I would ever meet was coming to kill me, and that he would arrive not as a man at all.

  I finished my coffee. I rinsed the mug. I set it upside down on the counter to dry, because I am a person who rinses her mug even during the apocalypse, and Tobias once told me this was either my best quality or a sign of severe psychological rigidity, and I told him it was both, and he laughed, and that was the last time I made my brother laugh, and I didn’t know it at the time, and isn’t that always the way.

  You don’t remember the last time. Not while it’s happening. You remember it later, in a kitchen that isn’t yours, at an hour that isn’t reasonable, holding a mug you’ve just rinsed out of habit while your whole life sits in a beaker on the counter, cooling.