‘You walk in the RV and it’s all there waiting, but it takes careful planning to keep everything in stock without tipping off the cops.’

‘You’re not doing badly, though,’ Charlie said, sweeping her arm out at the rows of freshly built shelves. ‘How much is your indoor pool and garden. Two million? Three? I could set up my own lab and do one job a week, and make more money than you pay me to work three long shifts.’

‘Nobody knows who you are,’ Mango said tartly. ‘I can charge fifteen grand for a procedure because I’m a qualified doctor, with hundreds of satisfied clients and a reputation for excellence. I never tout for work; every job comes through personal recommendation.

‘If you set up your own lab, you’d have all the stress and the risks, but you wouldn’t be competing with me. You’d be competing with Chinese labs that people find on the dark web. They charge five hundred dollars per mod, which wouldn’t cover the cost of base enzymes and auto-immune drugs.’

‘I don’t want to be your competition,’ Charlie said sharply. ‘I appreciate all that you’ve done for me, Mango. But the laws keep getting tougher. I’m risking serious jail time every time I step into the RV.

‘My plan was always to quit when I started college. But I’ve already saved enough to make college life bearable and it’s not worth risk and stress all through my last year of high school just to make a hundred grand or so.’

‘When things have gone well, you’ve had generous bonuses,’ Mango said. ‘When you asked for help, I took on your friend and paid her well too.’

Charlie got out of the armchair. ‘I don’t want to fight with you. I’ve said what I came here to say. And it was nice to see your six-million-dollar house.’

Mango was irritated by the sarcasm as Charlie stood and marched between boxes on the way to the library door.

‘I’m not prepared to offer you a percentage,’ Mango yelled after her. ‘But I do value your work, so I’ll discuss with Veryan, and we’ll see what we can squeeze out of the budget.’

42 ONE-ONE-SEVEN

Steak and Eggs was a sprawling pool deck and club on the roof of downtown’s trendy Red Spot Casino. The Nevada drinking age was twenty-one, but Axl Darmon was a spoiled Queensbridge senior, whose something-big-in-solar-energy father had spent thirty grand hiring the entire rooftop club for his son’s eighteenth-birthday bash.

Harry and Matt’s Uber dropped them in an underground car park, and scarily huge bouncers scanned barcodes on their invites before letting them ride a glass elevator up the side of the building to the twenty-third floor.

‘Those doormen were all natural,’ Matt joked as downtown’s glitz reflected on the elevator’s polished surfaces.