Page 85 of Dose

For one hour, Isla gave me authority inside limits we chose together. I returned it when the scene ended.

It did not undo either of our histories. I did not expect it to.

But she is asleep against me, and my hands are steady.

I can live with that tonight.

25

ISLA

The Archive smells like solder and cold coffee. Ezra has three versions of the same logistics tree open across three screens, each arranged according to a logic I understand only after he explains it twice.

Raphael replaced his coffee with decaf yesterday. Ezra noticed on the first sip and drank it anyway, which is how I know their conversation was serious.

Theon and I spoke to him the morning after the isolation suite, with Raphael present and no one else. Ezra admitted to the tremor and to sleeping less than three hours a night. He accepted the reduced overnight workload. He did not explain what started either problem, and none of us forced him.

Today his hands are steadier. Not still. Ezra’s hands are never still.

The western hub has a name now. Ezra pulled it out of a refrigerated-freight account two days ago—Seattle, hiding the way all of them hide, inside a company that sounds like nothing. The last blank space on the map has a city in it.

“Seattle’s synthesis logs,” he says without turning from the center screen. “Cross-reference them against the shipping manifests you flagged Tuesday.”

“I already did that Tuesday.”

“Different question.”

He finally looks at me. I wait.

“Where does the material actually originate?” he asks.

I return to the manifests.

The Seattle hub lists a distributor outside Tacoma as the vendor for one of its V-series intermediates. That was as far as I followed it the first time. Now I move backward through lot certificates, freight consolidations, and invoices split among three shell companies.

The same manufacturer appears beneath all of them.

“One producer,” I say. “Not just one distributor.”

Ezra says nothing.

I keep digging.

It takes eleven minutes to reach the bottom layer. The shell structure is almost elegant—good enough to survive an ordinary financial audit, not good enough to survive someone trained to build the same camouflage.

“Cascade Analytical Supply,” I say. “Actual plant in rural Texas. Registered as an agricultural-testing laboratory. The Tacoma address is only a distribution conduit.”

I send the corporate tree to his middle screen.

“Cascade manufactures the chlorinated intermediate. Seattle’s distributor relabels and forwards it. Six other U.S. facilities receive lots from the same Texas plant.”

Ezra stops moving.

“Single-source dependency,” he says.

“Across seven facilities.”

His model begins to change. Customer nodes expand beneath Cascade. Freight accounts connect to addresses we have seen but not yet validated. Two of the western hub’s four unidentified distribution points appear in the tree.