“Kent,” he replied. “I was just heading home. Can this wait until tomorrow?”

“No, sir.” Wilson closed the door behind him.

Holtzmann frowned. “What is it?”

“Sir,” Wilson. “It’s the Nexus from the assassination attempt. I found something…”

Holtzmann perked up. “You found an impurity! We can identify the source!”

Wilson blanched. “Sir, no, I didn’t find any impurities, but…”

“What?” Holtzmann cut in. “You just have to keep looking, Kent.”

“I found something else, Dr Holtzmann,” Wilson said. “A chemical barcode.”

Holtzmann frowned. “Why would they have put a barcode in?”

Wilson shook his head. “It’s our chemical barcode, sir. It came from here, from this lab. We made it.”

Then Holtzmann’s sight narrowed, and the world receded. Because if the Nexus had been taken from inside the ERD, then they’d come looking. And when they came looking… they’d find out about all the Nexus that he had taken from their supplies, for his own use, in his own skull…

And then his life would be over.

Holtzmann sat at his desk, after Wilson had gone, and stared at nothing. He’d extracted a vow of silence from the boy, snowed him with a claim that he would take this to Internal Affairs himself, that they had to keep it quiet so the thief would never know they were on his trail.

Now his hands shook. His mind wouldn’t focus. It was all coming down around him. He knew what he needed. Not a little one. More. Enough to make this pain and fear and nausea go away.

Holtzmann pulled up the interface, turned the dial, and stared at it. There must be a better way. For a moment he hesitated. Then he thought of what would happen when they caught him and it took his breath away. He turned the dial higher and pressed the mental button.

The relief was instant. It washed through him, taking away all his cares. Then behind it came more. A deep deep satisfaction. An ocean of pleasure. An epic wave of bliss rose up, higher and higher, and crested over him, and he was loose on that ocean, drifting in nothing but endless bliss. For a moment it was perfect. Then another wave crested over him, and another, and another, and he wasn’t floating on an ocean of pleasure, he was drowning in it, falling down, down, all thought washed away by the enormous weight of the opiate deluge crashing through his brain.

His last conscious thought was that he’d taken too much. Too much. And then the opiate sea swallowed him whole.

Lisa Brandt quietly opened the door to her Boston flat. It had been a long, discouraging day. Fucking politicians. They had no balls. Nexus was synonymous with suicide bombers now, with terrorists. They wouldn’t dare back legislation to decriminalize its use among autistic children, or to recognize children born with it as human. Not this close to the election.