The subject in the tank, 4896-T, was eight days into the growth process and was already recognizable as an adult humanoid. She appeared to be progressing well, but her HGH levels were uneven, which was concerning. I eyed the major muscle groups on the subject’s thighs, looking for signs of atrophy—the only visible indicator of the compartment syndrome that would result from the subject’s muscle growth outpacing the flexibility of her other tissues.
Of course, if there was atrophy, it was already too late to fix the problem. If there wasn’t atrophy, it would be tough to tell if there was any compartment syndrome at all without getting involved in some seriously invasive diagnostic procedures. Those procedures would interfere with the programming process significantly enough to make the subject useless for research purposes, and the waste would be a nightmare to justify when I was trying to get my budget for the next year locked down. I tapped my pen against my clipboard, mentally flipping through options.
It was a habit Nathan hated—the way I drummed out a beat while I was thinking. It was an indulgence I allowed myself only in my own lab, now, where he had never once set foot. It felt like a stolen luxury, a finger dragged through the frosting on an uncut cake.
“You missed a call,” Seyed said, interrupting my rhythm. I tamped down irritation: it wasn’t his fault that I hadn’t found the answer to the HGH problem before he finished his work. I didn’t bother to school my face to stillness as I turned toward him, though. I didn’t have to do that with Seyed. He would commence giving a shit about my emotions the moment I raised them as a subject of concern, and not a second sooner. Inside my lab, I could afford to frown.
“Congratulations, I suppose? I won’t be returning those calls,” I said.
Seyed emerged from the fume hood with a bundle of rags. He held the rags at arms’ length, walked them to the red biohazard bin next to the autoclave, and dropped them in along with his elbow-length gloves. With his bare hands he removed his respirator and, after a moment’s consideration, dropped it into the bin too. “Someone named ‘Martine.’”
The metal edges of the clipboard dug into the soft meat of my fingers.
I forced myself to loosen my grip. I replaced the clipboard, carefully threading the hole in the metal tab over the plastic hook that was affixed to the glass of the tank. The clipboard clicked against the glass, and the specimen in the tube twitched. I flinched. “Seyed, please do me a favor and line each clipboard in this lab with felt. Any neutral color. Back and edges.”
“You got it,” Seyed said, scrubbing his hands to the elbows with antimicrobial soap. “Deadline?”
“End of day,” I called over my shoulder, not looking back for confirmation.
I walked to the lab phone. There was a trash can on the floor next to it, which held messages—one of the many ways in which Seyed had streamlined the systems in the lab since I hired him. The legal pad next to the phone was dominated by a running tally of who had last ordered takeout. S, E, S, E, S, S, S, E, E, S, E. Next to the column of letters, Seyed had written the name “Martine” and a phone number. His handwriting was architect-tidy. “Did she say what she wanted?”
“No,” Seyed called back. “She just asked if I would pass along her regards and her ‘request for a return call at your earliest convenience.’ What kind of person talks like that?”
No kind of person talked like that.
My mother talked like that.
Martine talked like that.
I thanked Seyed, and my voice must have given something away, because he asked if I was okay. He never asked if I was okay, never. He would only have asked if I sounded truly broken. I swallowed another flash of anger as I told him that I was fine. “I mean, I’m not fine, but I’m fine,” I added, hating everything about the conversation already.
“Right, sure,” he said, his voice as steady as if I’d said something normal. As if he believed me.
That, I think, is the thing that made me tell him the truth. I hadn’t planned to say anything, but Seyed sounded like he believed me, like he thought it possible that I could be fine at a time like this one. “Martine is Nathan’s fiancée.”
I didn’t like to talk about Nathan. Especially not at work. Especially not with Seyed, whose connection to Nathan I’d so effectively severed. But there it was, in the room, right there where Seyed could hear it: Martine is Nathan’s fiancée. It was the first time I’d ever said that exact sentence out loud, and it stayed on my tongue with an aftertaste, like tin and brine.
Seyed sucked his teeth. “He’s engaged already? Shit, I’m sorry, that’s fucking terrible.”
“Yeah.” He was right. It was oddly satisfying to hear someone put it that way, because yeah. It was fucking terrible. “They’ve been together for a while now. I haven’t really talked to her beyond the bare minimum.” I shook my head. “I don’t know why she’d call me here.”
Seyed paused, his eyedropper of iodine hovering over a slide. “You’re listed in the staff directory.” He was being careful, staying neutral, trying not to step wrong. It didn’t suit him at all. “It was probably the only polite way she could figure out to contact you.”
A headache was spreading through my temples. I couldn’t tell if it was new, or the lingering remnants of my champagne hangover. “Right, no, I mean I don’t know why she’d call me at all.”
“One way to find out,” Seyed singsonged.
I glared at him, but he didn’t look up from his work, and after a few seconds the glare felt more like theater than anything else. I tore off the part of the legal pad with the phone number on it and tucked it into my breast pocket. It could wait.
Nothing Martine had to say to me could possibly be urgent.
Putting off the unpleasant business of returning Martine’s call was easy enough. The lab was full of work that urgently needed doing—assessing Seyed’s tissue samples, adjusting fluid levels in the specimen tanks, taking and testing new fluid samples from 4896-T, writing up a plan to level out the hormone ranges of several struggling specimens. I owed the lab director an expenditures report, and I needed to figure out how to massage the numbers in the report to justify a slow increase in costs. We were running through supplies faster than we could afford them, and the only solution was money.
Procrastination would have been easy enough, if not for the crinkle of paper in my pocket and the little blinking light in my brain: Martine called. Martine called. Martine called.
Why on earth would Martine call?
CHAPTER
FOUR
Late in the afternoon, Seyed sat on a lab stool next to me and eased my pencil out of my hand. “Hey, Evelyn?” He ducked his head and looked at me with his wide, patient brown eyes.
“Yeah?”
“You’re driving me fucking crazy.” He drummed the pencil on the side of my clipboard in a staccato rhythm. It was loud, uneven, and deeply irritating. He twisted in his chair, looked at the lab phone, looked back at the clipboard, tapped it with the pencil again. “You’ve been doing this shit all day,” he said. “Call Martine already.”
A flush of shame. Fidgeting. “You’re right. I don’t know why I’ve been—ugh. I’ll do it soon, okay?” I almost apologized, but I stopped myself just in time. It was one of my rules, a rule that my father branded into me when I was a child. It was a rule that had gotten me through grad school and internships and the endless fight for respect and recognition. Never apologize in the lab. Never apologize in the workplace.