Page 40 of Dose

“I’m verifying last night’s results.”

“Which results?”

“You.” I press my palm to her sternum, over the place where her heart is already accelerating. “I woke up and calculated the probability that I dreamed the entire event. It was uncomfortably high.”

“We had sex twice more before we slept. Three trials.” Her mouth curves. “That’s replication.”

“Three trials with a sample size of one.”

I turn her to face me and look properly. Swollen mouth. A faint bruise on her throat from my teeth. Her green eyes lift to mine. The guard is still there—I doubt she will ever be entirely gone—but she is no longer standing between us.

“The literature demands more data,” I say.

“The literature.” She sets the vial back into its rack. “Is that what we’re calling your hands? Because they’ve been on me for several minutes, and I haven’t logged a single curve.”

She is right. One hand has settled around her hip. The other is tracing the hem of my shirt where it meets her bare thigh.

I make both stop. They object. I overrule them.

We drink water, eat protein bars, shower, and dress. Then we cross into the annex in trousers, coats, eye protection, and fresh gloves like the competent chemists we allegedly are.

Once the work begins, we last eleven minutes.

Isla is pipetting an assay sample when it fails. Her tongue is caught between her teeth in concentration, and I stand beside her pretending to read a chromatogram while actually memorizing the faint mark above the collar of her lab coat.

“Your respiration is at twenty,” she says without looking up.

“Ambient conditions.”

“The ambient temperature is fourteen degrees Celsius. You keep it cold on purpose.” She dispenses the final aliquot, caps the source vial, seats it in the rack, and logs the time. Only then does she look at me. Her gaze travels downward, pauses, and returns to my face. “Theon. We have forty-one individualized release files to clear.”

“Thirty-nine. I cleared two while you slept.”

“When did you sleep?”

“Briefly.”

“That is not a time.”

“Sleep is temporarily losing.”

Her eyes narrow. I reach for her, stop before I touch her coat, and curl my hand into a fist instead.

“I keep needing to confirm you’re real,” I say. “I know it’s irrational. I wake up, and part of me is certain I'm still in the Ashford archive with my pistol raised—that I did what they built me to do and put you down like all the others—and everything since is a story my mind assembled so I'd never have to know it.”

Isla watches me for a long moment.

Then she stores the pipette, strips off her gloves, removes her eye protection and coat, and washes her hands. I follow her through the same sequence. She waits until we have both crossed the annex boundary before putting her palms against my bare chest. Her fingers find the formula hidden in the rose below my collarbone and trace it as if she can read the cipher through skin.

“Empirical test,” she says softly. “Invented women don’t do this.”

She rises onto her toes and kisses me.

It begins controlled. It does not stay that way. Her mouth opens beneath mine, tasting of tea, and my hands close around her waist. She grips my coat and pulls me closer. The annex alarm panel stays green behind her. Every sample is sealed. Every reaction is stable.

“The release checks,” she says against my mouth.

“Can stand for six hours without compromising the data.”