Page 93 of Dose

“I’ll get the logs.”

The door closes behind him.

Isla moves fast. She photographs all four walls, the refrigeration display and every relevant lot label. I copy the posted emergency procedure and the safety-data binder while she compares batch codes.

“Seven customer families,” she murmurs. “Seattle is here. These two codes match the distribution points we couldn’t confirm. Three more are consistent with Ezra’s tree.”

“Compound identity?”

“Still incomplete. The internal sheet omits the structure and concentration. We don’t sample it.”

It costs her nothing to say it. No frustration, no urge to prove that her skill makes uncertainty safe. Just the correct decision.

“Production status?”

She checks the board mounted beside the refrigerator. “Active. Two lots scheduled this week. We leave all of it exactly where it is.”

Pride moves through me, dark and warm. Not because she obeyed. Because she is good enough to know where expertise ends.

Corbin returns with a folder thin enough to be insulting.

Isla reviews the first page. “These are summaries.”

“That’s what we keep for inspections.”

“Then I need the source records those summaries were prepared from.” She marks three lines with a yellow tab. “Your purchased volume, declared use and hazardous-waste output don’t reconcile. It may be a unit-conversion error, but I can’t close the review without the supporting filings.”

They do reconcile. Isla found a rounding difference small enough to be harmless and awkward enough to exploit.

“Those are archived,” Corbin says.

“I’ll wait.”

He leaves again, less cooperative this time.

Dominic’s voice reaches us. “He’s looking for records that exist but aren’t where he thinks they are. I have twelve minutes before Deb tells him which cabinet.”

“Data access?” I ask.

“Ready.”

Isla closes the paper folder. “Go.”

I want her beside me. Her assignment, however, is here—customer codes, chain of custody and keeping Corbin occupied if he returns early.

I touch two fingers to the inside of her wrist. “Stage report in four minutes.”

“I know.”

Her pulse is steady beneath my fingertips.

I leave her anyway.

The server room smells of dust and overworked cooling fans. Dominic has the side panel open on an instrument-network controller, the legitimate reason his false employer sent him here. A maintenance cable runs from it to the terminal.

“Commercial encryption on the business records,” he says. “Customer files are copying now. The persistence package is dormant and in place. It won’t call home until tomorrow night.”

“Can they find it?”