I’ve spent so much of my time thinking about what used to be, how I used to be, but the future always remained a blur. Up until now, that is. Now I see ghosts of years to come, only malformed swirls at first, then coalescing into razor-sharp pictures in full color. Me, babbling nonsense phrases after they inject me with a serum of my own making. Me, bent-backed and gray, pulling at a patch of weeds with hands I no longer recognize. Me, lying on a cot under a thin blanket, shivering in winter. Me, vacant-eyed and, perhaps, teetering on the edge between awareness and insanity, wondering where they all went to. Steven, Sam, Leo, Sonia. Baby.

Only when Lorenzo takes me by the arm and pulls me up do I realize I’ve been sitting on the lab floor, my back resting against the bottom row of empty wire cages.

“It’s all right, Gianna,” he says, brushing the tears from my eyes with his fingers. “It’s all right.”

“It isn’t, you know.”

“It will be.”

I want to bury myself inside him, but I remember the cameras. “I’m fine,” I say, straightening myself out. “Let’s get on with the injections.”

When I first started experiments with lab animals, I had one golden rule: don’t name them. In other words, don’t think of them as pets; don’t think of them as anything other than a way to get from point A to point B. Think of them as test tubes or Petri dishes or microscope slides, nothing more than innate vehicles to fill and observe. While I hold each tiny mouse for Lorenzo to inject with a potion that will either cure it or kill it, all I can think of is the names I’ve given them:

Jackie. Lin. Jean.

Chapter Fifty-one

FIFTY-ONE

Lorenzo’s idea is risky, but necessary.

After we’ve called upstairs for an assistant to clean up the lab and filed a report for Morgan, I leave first, retracing my steps through the security checkpoint. There’s a new pair of soldiers on guard during the afternoon shift, their uniforms pressed to sharp creases, their boots shined to a high polish that reflects the entry vestibule’s fluorescent lights. My purse goes back on the conveyor belt to be scanned while one of the soldiers pats me down, his hands running short, swift arcs over my hips, back, stomach, breasts. Once cleared, I walk out into the May sunshine.

May 31, I think, is my birthday, the day Steven ran off with a wad of cash from Patrick’s wallet, and the day I’ll meet Lorenzo for another secret rendezvous in a rented Maryland crab shack.