He didn’t even notice that everyone dressed in a white lab coat, even if they’d never touched a beaker in their life. They dressed like that because he wore one.

This was his domain, his church, his heaven on earth. No one questioned Hëró here, and no one ever doubted him. When we arrived, we were treated like more than a novelty: We were royalty. Treasures. A creation as great and potentially humanity-altering as any of his others.

The office, like the rest of Viloxin, has changed. Its address is the same, but when Noni, Teddy, and I walk inside, an informational portal stands where Dad’s bust did. The lobby is double its original height and has been redone completely in silver. Everyone wears suits and looks straight ahead, completely erect as if compelled by magic, using biometric scanners to enter high-speed elevators. The only visible security measures are the video cameras, black as night, dotting the silver every couple of feet, like an inverted night sky.

The waist-high lobby gate opens automatically for us, and Teddy shepherds us through. He smiles at us, in between fiddling with his phone. We’re ushered up to Dad’s old office floor—the office he hardly entered, since he was in the lab so much. I’m sweating through my shirt. My feet pinch in Lady’s Chloé wedges, but I wore them for luck, and I feel them giving me a little bounce, a necessary lightness.

A humorless assistant in a pencil skirt and stilettos—who doesn’t even bother to look us up and down—walks us through the silver halls, replete with smart touch screens, every ounce of Dad scrubbed clean from them. The portraits are gone, the moldings ripped out. The new Hero Pharm logo is simple and friendly-looking, in that false corporate way that sends chills through you if you think too hard.

No one stands outside their office, clapping as we pass, as they once did. They glance at us and look away, frosting their windows onto the hall with a touch of a button, and Noni’s hand grips mine tighter, to calm me.

This is Nítuchí’s Hero Pharm, where Saturday is just the first day of the work week.

We arrive at a large conference room with a soul-shaking view of Limatra. Everything, everyone reduced to minuscule dolls and doll houses. How could anyone working here, with this view, ever remember they aren’t some kind of deity?

Seated around the boardroom table are many familiar faces from the party, all in suits, and at the head is—

Nítuchí, of course. The CEO in a navy suit, his mouth a furious slit.