Chapter 2: Juvenile Delinquency in Organic Chemistry

The neurologist's office was on the fourth floor of a building designed to suggest that difficult things could be processed efficiently, given the right lighting. The carpet was a muted blue-gray. The chairs were padded. A small fountain on the credenza produced a sound like water thinking about itself. Dr. Valeria Reyes had arranged her desk so that the window was behind her, which meant her face was always slightly backlit, her expressions softened to approximation. Walter had noticed this on their first visit and decided it was a considered architectural choice rather than an oversight. A woman who delivered this kind of news for a living would understand the value of controlled ambiguity.

Flynn sat between them in the middle chair. He was wearing his good jacket without being asked, which Walter understood to be armor.

"What we're seeing," Dr. Reyes said, placing a scan on the lightboard with the practiced ease of someone who had done this so many times it had become neutral, "is progressive deterioration in the corticospinal tract. The myelin sheath. Here, and here." She indicated two areas with a pen. The scan looked like a photograph of weather. "The symptom progression you've been tracking — the tremors, the balance disruption, the fine motor incidents — is consistent with this pattern."