The pain woke me up. Every heartbeat sent it throbbing through my skull. But I couldn’t touch my head. Nylon bands bound me to the chair.

I was beneath one of the empty light fixtures at the back of the room. I could see the doors closed over the holes. I was feet from the body I’d seen, just a wooden slab between us. Dr. Kriss stood at the sink, squeezing out bags of solution while listening to her iPod. I heard the milky stream ringing off the basin. Every time she’d twisted out the final drops, she ran the faucet to wash it down, then chucked the empty bag on the pile.

I didn’t say anything, just watching her work. She was singing “Ray of Light.” When she noticed I was awake, she pulled out the white earbuds.

“I hate doing this,” she said, finishing one off. “This is the final batch.”

She picked up a full bag and came over to perch on a stool in front of me. This would be our last interview, no notebook, no recorder.

Dr. Kriss tossed the bag in my lap. It jiggled on impact and settled.

“I was this close to getting it right.” She stared at the bag. “This batch is the product of countless reformulations, all based on the trial’s data pool. It’s that much closer to the real thing. Maybe it is the real thing. We’ll never know, thanks to you.”

I could barely hear for the rush of blood in my head.

“Do you realize what you’ve done?” she said. “The number of lives we could’ve saved?”

“You still expect—” A heap of phlegm clogged my throat. I spat, but the wad didn’t clear my leg.

Dr. Kriss looked on with disgust.

“You still expect me to believe you care about saving lives,” I said.

She planted her feet, leaned forward from the stool, my frustrated instructor. “Everything great is built on this,” she said with finality.

“On what?”

“Lives—someone’s, somewhere. No one cares, you understand? No one cares who died carrying stones for the cathedral, or who’s buried in the diamond mine—”

“Or whose house burned down.”

“If the solution worked, no one would even ask. The story would’ve been true by the time you told it. I only needed a few more months, maybe weeks.”

I told her that would’ve been of little comfort to her subjects, and she said, as if with pity, “You looked in the hole.”

“Yes.”

“Brave of you.”

“There must’ve been some other way,” I said. “Why did you need to rush like this?”

The impact of the question surprised me. Dr. Kriss looked about the room with dismay, as if she could see all her failures at once.

“I told you about my father,” she said.

“So?”