Tunes helped an hour pass. Charlie got knocked out of her groove when she picked the wrong sample out of a warming cabinet. Getting a sample mixed up could have horrific health consequences and Mango had trained Charlie and Juno to follow strict labelling and task-separation protocols. But the screw-top bottle in Charlie’s hand had no label at all.

‘What’s this, Juno?’

Juno looked up from a spinning centrifuge and seemed startled.

‘Oh, that’s mine,’ she said, reaching out to grab.

Charlie would have accepted a labelling error, but they were almost out of syringes and a short time earlier she’d noticed there was only one sterile pack left in the cupboard, when there should have been two. She’d also noticed extra glassware in the dishwasher.

Charlie jiggled the sample, refusing to hand it over. ‘What is this?’

‘I had a sample jam in the sequencer. So I started from scratch, rather than find out it had gone wrong after I’d done another two hours’ work.’

It was a credible excuse, but Charlie didn’t buy it.

‘If the sequencer had cooked one of your samples, you’d have moaned like hell,’ Charlie said.

‘OK, it’s off the books,’ Juno admitted. ‘A private job.’

‘Pardon me?’ Charlie said, eyes growing wide. ‘A job for who?’

‘A guy Seth knows.’

‘Some guy your boyfriend knows? Do you even know what you’re making?’

‘He’s a personal trainer,’ Juno admitted. ‘It’s a non-targeted therapy that boosts muscle and endurance.’

‘There’s a reason people save for months and pay ten grand for individually targeted therapy,’ Charlie spat. ‘Broad-spectrum gene edits have a massively greater risk of tumours or other long-term damage. And if they don’t take auto-immune drugs and there’s a reaction …’

‘I’m making enough E. coli for a thousand doses,’ Juno said. ‘They sell for a hundred bucks a pop. Mine and Seth’s half share comes to fifty grand. It’s enough to get the deposit for a nice house, for my son, your godson. And this one job makes more than Mango pays me in three months.’

‘I’ve been to prison once,’ Charlie said, shaking a fist. ‘Do you want to go too? Do you want to see Patrick dragged off by social services?’

‘Mango is ripping us off,’ Juno spat back. ‘Two hundred fifty an hour for you, one fifty for me. Sounds like a lot when you compare it to working a register at K-Mart, but I’ll bet she’s making eighty or ninety thousand dollars from the six treatments we’re doing tonight. We’re doing all the hard work, and we’re getting less than ten per cent of the money.’