Chapter 5: Ysolde's Classification Report, Redacted

The field station on Ark Tessaly occupied the northeastern corner of a mid-tier residential platform that had been converted, badly, from what the structural plaques still identified as a secondary school. Whoever had done the conversion had left the height markings on one wall — child-sized increments in faded yellow paint, a ghost record of a world that had measured its children by centimeters and expected them to keep growing.

Karev had been to the station twice before. Both times, the biotech liaison had been someone else.

He found her on the second visit's second floor, which meant climbing a staircase that had developed a particular looseness in the fourth and seventh steps that he catalogued automatically as he went. The lab occupied three connected classrooms — walls knocked through with the structural enthusiasm of someone working from necessity rather than expertise, the load-bearing columns left standing in the middle of the space like an afterthought. Equipment covered every horizontal surface that wasn't being used for walking. Chemical suspension units hummed against the eastern wall in a row, their indicator lights a slow blue pulse in the afternoon gray coming through windows that had been sealed with polyfilm and weather tape.