“I don’t care what she says.” She was conscious in the moment of a multiplicity of things, the way the light caught his eyes when he wasn’t wearing his glasses, the breeze, the smell of chemicals from the company’s smokestacks, two toddlers with their mother, a dog running free at the edge of the grass, clouds, shade, the world as it is.

“You mean you won’t tell her?”

“No, I’ll keep it a secret.” She hesitated. “Between you and me.”

He let out a laugh. “Right, and Professor Stoll, Professor Rothlin, all our colleagues, all their assistants, the janitorial staff, and, and—”

“I don’t care,” she said. “I want to be part of this.”

He shrugged. He was leaning back, bracing himself on both elbows so that you could see the muscles of his chest stand out against the fabric of his shirt. “Today?” he said. “Would you like to try it today—just a moderate dose, nothing like what I ingested, but more than Stoll and Rothlin and the others, say one hundred micrograms? Just to be sure you’re going to fully experience the effects?”

In answer, she just smiled.

It felt almost illicit, just the two of them there in the lab at four in the afternoon, he measuring out the dose and mixing it with water, just as he’d done two months earlier on the day she’d chased him down Bottmingenstrasse on her bicycle and gone into his house and seen him transformed. “Are you ready, Fräulein?” he asked, just as he’d asked on that chaotic day, the same words exactly, only now he was holding out the glass to her and he would be the observer and she the subject. Was she frightened? A little, she supposed. She couldn’t quite suppress the image of him as he lay there helpless on the sofa and how he’d cried out and how frightened she’d been, but she had confidence in him—he’d taken an enormous dose, an overdose, that was all . . . and if old men like Stoll and Rothlin could go ahead and take the drug, well, she could too.

She drank, conscious of his eyes on her. The lab was quiet. The sun, which had shone so brightly at lunch, had disappeared behind the clouds and the room darkened a shade. She gave him a smile and handed back the glass. “No taste at all,” she told him, and they were both smiling now.

“Good,” he said, “good. And please remember to record all your impressions and keep as accurate a time line as you can. You shouldn’t feel anything for perhaps forty minutes to an hour or even longer, depending—”

“Depending on what?” Her smile vanished, just like the sun. It came to her—again, but thunderously now—that she’d just poisoned herself.