I turned, searching for Dante. He was at the far end of the hall, arms folded, eyes locked on the entry to the next chamber. I saw it then, the detail I’d missed: there was a second room, sealed off with actual metal, not glass. That’s where they kept the humans.
My brain snapped a picture of the keypad, the camera angle, the name on the swipe panel. I filed it away, thinking of ways to get in, ways to get out. If I was going to sabotage this, I needed access—and I needed Heller to trust me enough to leave me alone with the protocol.
“Can I see the subject?” I asked, not caring how cold I sounded.
“No,” Heller said. “We find that researchers do the best without interacting with the subjects.”
“Do I have to school you on ethics, Dr. Heller?” I asked, despite myself.
She bristled, but covered it with a black-lipsticked smile. “Of course not, Dr. Bentley. But we’re not in academia now, are we? This is a private facility. We have different priorities. I thought you’d understand that, given your…unique situation.”
Her gaze darted toward Dante.
I could have lunged for her, I really could have. Instead, I drew a slow breath and let it out, feeling every cold milky atom of air. “You want to get this right?” I said. “You’re going to need transparency. You’re going to need to know when your data is lying to you, and you can’t do that without seeing the subject.That’s not a matter of ethics. That’s a matter of not being a fucking idiot.”
She blinked at me then, just for a second, and for that split second I saw the crack in the wall. She wanted to argue, but she also wanted results, and I was the only person in the hemisphere qualified to read the next batch of logs.
“Fine,” she said. “You can observe. But you don’t touch. You don’t even go past the first door.”
I nodded, like that was a win. “Deal.”
She led us down the line, past the caged macaques, past a row of ferret cages, to the heavy metal door at the end. She swiped her card, punched in the code. It was four digits. I made a note of the sequence and the way she half-wheeled her body to block me from seeing the last two.
Inside, the lights were dim. The human subject was in a hospital bed, arms and legs lashed down more gently than I expected, but still—restraints. She was young, maybe twenty, with a closely shaved skull and a ragged tan line across her wrist where a watch once lived. Her eyes were closed, but she was still alive. Monitors beeped, displaying heart, respiration, oxygen. No family photos taped to the IV. Everything sterile, everything clinical. The only trace of personality was a chipped purple nail polish on her left pinky.
Heller hovered in the doorway, but I stepped up to the glass and looked in.
“She can hear you,” Heller said. “Even when sedated. Sometimes she tries to speak.”
I pressed my palm to the glass. “She have a name?”
Heller shrugged. “Not for our purposes. She’s Subject 5.”
I wanted to throw up. But I didn’t, because I was here for a reason. I watched the rise and fall of Subject 5’s chest, the way she twitched in her sleep, probably tracking the dream-logic of a brain being re-written by a rogue genome.
“She volunteered?” I asked.
Heller didn’t answer.
Dante moved in beside me, just close enough that his knuckles grazed my elbow. I wondered how much of this he was taking in—whether the steel in his eyes was for me, or for the whole rotten system.
I studied Subject 5 for as long as Heller let me. The girl’s face was slack, her hair already growing in awkward bristles above the suture line. Even in the low light I could see bandages stained with fresh seep, a trace of dried blood at the edge of the gauze. Her chest rose and fell in a shallow, arrhythmic way that made me want to bang on the glass and shout for someone to fix it. But they knew. They’d seen it before, probably a hundred times. This was the cost of running ahead of the curve.
There was a printout taped to the foot of the bed: a chart, hand-updated every hour, with a column for “Self-Report.” I scanned the notes. Most were empty. Occasionally, a time-stamped sentence: “It hurts.” “I can’t move.” “My mother’s name is gone.” The last entry was in block letters: “AM I STILL HERE.”
I felt the prickle of tears behind my eyes, but I blinked them back. I could hear Heller breathing just behind me, the damp little puffs of someone who felt victorious, or nervous, or both. I made myself look again—really look—at the way the girl’s hands curled into her sheets; the way the intravenous line had been re-taped, over and over, as if the nurses were trying to erase any trace of injury. Or guilt.
“She’s stable,” Heller said, but I heard the lie in the hesitation. “She won’t remember any of this, you know. The protocol wipes most new memory formation within hours. It’s cruel in the short term, but merciful later.”
I wanted to punch her in the throat, but instead I asked, “Have you tried off-target mapping?”
Heller stared at me like I’d just offered to teach her to tie her shoes. “It’s in the protocol,” she said, voice cold.
“Show me.”
The next ten minutes were a blur of PDFs, charts, and data dumps. I only half-listened to Heller’s explanations. Instead, I memorized the folder structure, the way she keyed in her password, the exact spot on the wall where a hairline crack in the paint ran beside the security camera. I could see how to break this place. I could see where it would fail, if you pushed hard enough.
Dante didn’t say a word. He just stood with his arms folded, watching me watch Heller.
