“Correct. Try that, and you’ll fry half his brain. This needs to be administered locally. In situ, as Caesar would say. It’s one thing to repair cells. Overshoot the target and, okay, no big deal, you’ve got a few extra happy neurons. Destroying them is a different pile of wax.”

“Ball of wax.” The correction comes naturally to me, so naturally I don’t hear it over the single word screaming inside my brain: Trepanation. “No way, Enzo. We’ll never pull it off.” Not only that, but the thought of wielding an electric drill within a mile of a human skull—even Morgan’s—makes me ill.

“Maybe not.” He checks around the lab, counting heads with the ink end of his pen. “Fifty people in here, not counting our boys in blue. A few of them look like they’ve been recruited young, straight out of school. But they’re not that young, Gianna. Grad students, at the least. How about we take a walk around and read ID cards?” He points toward the lab entrance. “You take that end; I’ll take the back. Nothing thorough, just a quick survey of titles, okay? Anyone asks, you’re on your way to the security desk to call your husband. About the car.”

Of course I need to call Patrick, since it doesn’t look as if I’ll be getting out of this building soon. He’ll need the Honda, or, at least, what I left inside the Honda. I leave my four-foot-square work space and start walking down the nearest aisle toward Sergeant Petroski’s desk. Slowly.

“I need to make a call,” I say. “To let my husband know I’m not coming home tonight.”

Petroski smiles. “Sure, ma’am. Number?”

“I’ll dial it.”

“Afraid I have to do that for you.”

Of course he does. He probably has to speak for me, too.

I’m right about this. Petroski asks for the message and hands me a blank sheet of notepaper and a pen. “Just write it all down here, and I’ll convey it. Word for word.”

The note’s short. Pick up car, get Sonia’s sippy cup. She’ll have a meltdown if she has to go to bed without it. It isn’t really a lie, not if you put some of the verbs in the past tense. I hand it over to Petroski and blink three times.

He blinks back.

“Anything else, Dr. McClellan?” he says.

I remember a different soldier sitting at this desk when Lorenzo and I came in, so Petroski must have arrived recently. “You’re on duty tonight?”

“Yes, ma’am. Another graveyard shift.”

My eyes move to his left hand. “You’re married,” I say.

Of course he is.

“Yes, ma’am. Two years this month.” His mouth curls into an embarrassed smile. “We were high school sweethearts.”