Chapter 11: Nadia's Compound and What It Costs

The compound arrived in Viktor's laboratory at 11:47 PM, which meant Nadia had been awake for at least thirty-six hours.

He knew her working rhythms the way he knew his own — better, in some respects, because he had spent three years watching them from a shared office in Budapest where the coffee was bad and the light was good and Nadia had a habit of going very still when she was close to something and very loud when she found it. She was not loud when she delivered the compound. She set it on his workbench in a sealed pharmaceutical transport case, placed a fourteen-page annotated formula sheet beside it, and stood with her hands in her coat pockets while he read the first page.

"Second revision," she said. "The metabolic acceleration variable — I recalibrated the binding coefficient using your morning blood work. The therapeutic window under regenerative stress is now approximately forty percent wider than in the first formula."