Chapter 5: The Last Honest Lesson

The lab smelled the way it always smelled in the morning — bleach from the overnight custodial pass, underneath that something mineral and faintly astringent that no amount of cleaning ever entirely removed. Marcus had come to think of it as the smell of honest work. Chemicals did not pretend to be other than what they were. They followed rules. The rules were knowable.

He wrote the day's objective on the whiteboard in his usual hand — block letters, no cursive, a precision the students had stopped remarking on.

SYNTHESIS PURITY: MECHANISM, MEASUREMENT, AND MEANING.