They put me in a holding room on the lower level of the staff dorm.
No window. One LED panel in the ceiling that doesn't switch off. They take my phone, my watch, the lanyard. They tell me it's a secured cooling-off pursuant to the NDA. I know what it is.
I don't know what they're doing to him.
Are they drawing blood? Cutting? Cracking him open already? When I think about a scalpel touching that long blue line of his tail my chest closes.
The fear is real. It is so real I can taste it myself, metallic, the way he described it.
And a thought slides under everything: he can taste it too. Wherever he is, he can taste it.
I sit on the floor in the corner. I lose hours.
The door beeps.
Kovacs comes in. He puts a tray of cafeteria food on the floor. He stays standing. He looks down.
"Your favorite is being difficult."
He says it lazy.
"We tried to get a clean blood draw. He almost cracked the inner pane. Do you have any idea what acrylic of that grade costs."
I look up at him.
"What did you do to him."
He lifts his hands. Empty palms. Innocent.
"Just persuasion. The scales are absurd, by the way. We can't get a needle in for a sedative without eight pounds of pressure."
He squats in front of me. His knees pop.
He puts a hand under my jaw and tips my face up.
His thumb is on the line of my cheek. He is too close. The lab smell on him is somebody else's cologne and old coffee.
"There's an interesting effect," he says, like he's reading me a lab note.
"Every time we get close to you, or do anything that might cause you discomfort, his vitals spike. Cortisol equivalent. Tail movement. Pretty graph."
"Like right now."
His face moves toward mine. It is millimeters.
I jerk my head away so hard I hit the wall.
"Don't touch me —"
He laughs.
He stands up. He flicks invisible dust off his sleeve.
"Hayes. Don't be precious."
"Vandermeer says — and this is generous — if you persuade him to cooperate with the deep panel, your name stays on the patents. First-author still."
"Cooperate with the slicing," I say, dry.
His face changes. It cools.
"You're not getting it."
He pulls an iPad out of his bag. He thumbs in.
He turns the screen toward me, holding it inches from my eyes.
It's the lab. It's the tank.
Three men in EMS-blue suppression suits are standing at the deck rail, taking turns with stun batons on long poles, jabbing them down into the water. Blue arcs flicker through the tank in the half-second the prods touch. Lir is jammed against the inside of the acrylic, the tail tucked tight, scales rasping the wall. Each prod, his whole body kicks once, like a fish on a line.
Each prod.
Each prod.
"Stop it. Stop it. Stop —"
I try to get the iPad. Kovacs steps back and kicks me in the stomach, casual, a kid kicking a dog. I fold over and can't breathe and can't breathe and can't breathe.
His voice comes from the ceiling.
"There. See."
"That's what disobedience gets him. Every time you say no, he gets another half hour of that."
"I assume he tasted that one. The despair. How was it. Did he like it."
He laughs, low.
"Sloane. You brought him here."
"His life or his death is a choice you keep making."
The door beeps and the room goes back to white silence.
I lie on the floor. The image of the blue arc keeps going off behind my eyes.
This is on me.
I'm the one who hauled him up out of the dark.
I did this.
The grief and the guilt come down so heavy I can't separate them. They are one solid thing.
I close my eyes. I can hear him, a hallucination so clear it is more real than the room.
This taste —
Is this 'despair'?
It's too full. I think it's going to break me.
I cave.
When they walk me back into the lab Lir is in the tank, very still. There are bare patches on his shoulder and along the curve of one hip — pink, raw, the size of a thumb each, where scales have been pulled. Three of them, that I can count.
When he sees me his eyes brighten and then go down.
"You came."
His voice is fainter than I have ever heard it.
I walk to the acrylic. I put my forehead against it.
"Lir. Cooperate with them."
It comes out like sandpaper.
"If you cooperate they won't keep doing this."
He looks at me. He says nothing.
Kovacs is at the deck rail with a cardiac biopsy tray in his gloved hands.
"You heard her. Be a good boy."
"Arm out, please."
There's a sample port on the acrylic at chest height — sealed nipple, glove-box style, designed for clean draws. Lir looks at me one more time. Then, slowly, he extends his arm. The blue length of it, scaled, perfect. He fits it through the port.
The needle goes in.
His blood comes up the line. It is blue. It is the color of a thing that should never be in a tube.
His body locks. He doesn't fight. He doesn't pull.
He looks at me through the water and the acrylic. The gold eyes hold my face like that's the only thing in the room with shape.
My chest is being cut, slow, with a butter knife.
"Excellent," Kovacs says. He is watching the blue blood the way a sommelier watches a pour. "Keep being good, Hayes. I'll keep your researcher comfortable."
He says it to Lir. He's threatening Lir with my comfort.
Lir cooperates.
The next month is a long quiet butchering.
Every day. Blood. Scales. A skin punch from the soft underside of his forearm, where it goes from blue to silver. A nerve sample, that one took two of them. Each time he holds his arm to the port and lets them. Each time I stand at my permitted distance with my face arranged.
My grief, the first week, is on fire. The second week it's a thudding behind a wall. The third week it is nothing at all.
Lir has stopped grading me.
Because there is nothing left to grade.
I am a wooden person doing a job.
One night the shift goes home and Kovacs forgets to lock me out. I sit down on the deck floor with my back against the acrylic. He floats inside, level with my shoulder.
"Hey."
His voice is small.
"Are you okay."
I don't answer.
"Your taste — it's gone."
"It's nothing. A flat — desert, with no edge to it."
I open my eyes.
"That's better, isn't it," I say. "You're free of me."
"No."
He shakes his head. The gold has something in it I have never seen — the distant cousin of grief, his version, blunt and confused.
"I'd rather have the bitter than the empty."
He puts his hand flat on the inside of the acrylic. His palm is right under my cheek.
"Show me joy again."
"Like the foam on a wave, in sunlight. The way you taught me."
"Show me that one."
My eyes spill over. They have not spilled in weeks. They go now in a steady line down both sides of my face.
He remembers the words.
He kept them.
I press my hand against the acrylic, opposite his.
"Okay," I whisper. "I promise."
I look at his face through the cold inch of plastic, and the plan forms in my head all at once. Whole. A little insane. Specific.
I'm getting him out of this place.
Or I'm taking it down with us.
I start performing compliance.
I go to Kovacs in his office and offer him my "rapport." I tell him I can settle the asset, deepen the cooperation, get him through deeper protocols with less restraint. I keep my voice tired, defeated, the right amount.
He buys it. He buys it because he wants to.
My key-card comes back. He even smiles at me, paternal, when he hands it over. Good girl, Hayes.
I have access to the lab again. To the bench storage. To the chemical inventory. To the building management system.
The Mira Vita wet labs run on FM-200. Clean agent, drops a fire by displacement, leaves the equipment alive. The ceiling heads above A-001's tank room hang off that loop.
Four nights as a ghost in my own building. I pull the local FM-200 cylinder. I walk a substitute over from the chemistry annex two buildings down — they characterize combustion behavior over there and they keep their inventory the way I keep my houseplants — and I charge it with something that is not a clean agent at all. I rewire the local zone to trigger off tomorrow's systems test. I swap one tag for another and walk away.
The building thinks the cylinder still has FM-200 in it. The deluge heads think they will spray a clean agent.
I have become, apparently, an arsonist with good lab hygiene.
They will not.
Lir watches me work, night after night, and says nothing. He has figured out something is moving. He performs his tank life flawlessly — every sample drawn, every scale taken, every cooperation rendered. He starves Kovacs of any reason to stop.
Kovacs has now climbed all the way up onto his own ladder. He scheduled a demonstration.
"Tomorrow," he tells me, the night before, in his office, drinking eighteen-year scotch out of a plastic cup. "Tomorrow we make history. Live cortical biopsy. Director's there. Three of the principals from Strand are flying in. Sloane — humanity is about to enter the age of the un-aging."
He is glittering.
"Yes," I say. "Tomorrow."
The morning of the demonstration they move Lir out of the holding tank into a steel half-trough on the demonstration floor. Wrist cuffs. Ankle cuffs. Tail in two heavy clamps. Most of his body is up out of the water, exposed to the air. The observation gallery is full of suits. Vandermeer in pearls. Three Strand men with the same blandly handsome faces.
Kovacs at the mic.
"For the safety of the demonstration, the asset will receive a high-dose paralytic and central nervous depressant. This will guarantee complete stillness during cranial entry."
A vial the color of antifreeze goes into a needle. The needle goes into Lir.
His chest stops moving so fast. The gold of his eyes loses focus. He is sliding.
He looks at me. His mouth shapes a word.
Now.
I don't think.
I run for the master station. I slap the test button on the building suppression panel — the one I rewired — and at the same moment I hit the emergency-egress override on the door system.
The alarm comes on like a wall of red light.
Every electronic lock in the wet wing fails open at once.
The deluge heads on the ceiling open up.
What comes out of them is not FM-200. It comes out as a fine mist that catches the gallery lights and shimmers wrong.
"What the hell —" Kovacs is at me, teeth showing, clawing past a Strand man in the way.
I have a stun baton off the security cart. I aim it at the cardiac monitor on the demo bench. I pull the trigger.
The arc kisses the air.
The air opens.
The shockwave puts me on my back with no memory of going. The ceiling above the demo bench is a sheet of yellow flame. The walls are catching. The gallery is screaming.
In the middle of the fire, Lir kicks once.
Both ankle cuffs come off the trough wall like rivets out of cardboard. The two tail clamps go after them. He sits up out of the burning water — he should not be able to, with what's in him — and the wrist cuffs split.
He doesn't go for the door.
He goes for me.
The blue tail loops me, the way it did once before, and he throws me — careful, exact — across the lab toward the only fire door still standing. The far one, west wing.
"Go!"
The voice that comes out of him is not the cold lab voice. It is hoarse and full and human-sized.
I land in the corridor on hands and knees and I roll over to look back.
The lab is a furnace. The trough's seawater is boiling off in white sheets. Lir is in the middle of it. His tail is in the open air now, no water on it, and the iridescent scales are curling along the edges, blackening, flaking off in shapes like burned leaves. The skin is splitting. Blood the color of his eyes wells up.
He is on fire.
He looks at me through it.
He works his face into a shape I taught him, slow and careful, like a child sounding out a word. The corners of his mouth pull up. His eyes squint. It is the worst smile I have ever seen, the smile of someone who has never made one before, made now under the wrong circumstances.
It is the joy face.
His mouth shapes silently, through the heat shimmer:
Foam on a wave, in sunlight. Is this what it feels like.
My world ended. Right there. In that second.