Chapter 5

Chloe's POV

"That depends on what you give me access to," I said. "A lab. Her original research notes, whatever your people recovered. Time without someone's hand on my throat."

I turned and looked at him directly. "Give me those three things, and I can give you a working timeline. Ask me to pull a number out of the air right now and I'll just be telling you what you want to hear."

He looked at me for a long moment, and his expression stayed exactly the same through all of them. I held his gaze and didn't fill the silence, because I'd already said the thing and adding to it would only dilute it. The worst thing I could do right now was keep talking.

My pulse was steadier than it had any right to be. I noticed that, the way you notice something strange about your own reflection — detached, clinical, like it was happening to someone else. Ten minitues ago I'd been on my knees on Linda's floor with his hand around my throat and the room going gray at the edges.

Now I was sitting in the back of his car negotiating timelines. Something had shifted in me at some point between those two moments, and I wasn't entirely sure when. I just knew the fear was still there — I could feel it, low and cold, the way you feel a bruise when you press on it — but it wasn't running anything anymore. I was.

That was either very smart or very stupid. Probably both.

"One hundred days."

The highway lights swept across his face one by one, those silver-gray eyes fixed on the window outside, like what he'd just said wasn't a number that could get someone killed but an unremarkable meeting time.

"What," I said. "You're serious."

"Always."

"My mother spent ten years on this."

"Your mother is dead."

Flat. No malice in it, no sympathy either, the way you'd flag a data error in a spreadsheet. My fingers tightened against my knee once, then let go.

"What she left behind is fragments," I said. "Not a complete formula — scattered data segments, no index, no context. Turning fragments into something usable takes time, and not because I'm slow. It's because this was never a job one person could finish in three months. Six months, minimum."

"No."

"Five."

"No."

I turned and looked at him. He was still watching the window, his jawline going light and dark with every passing streetlamp, his expression exactly the same as it had been a minute ago. He wasn't considering it. He'd never been considering it. One hundred days wasn't a starting point for negotiation on his end — it was a door that had already closed.

I changed direction.

"How many do you have left?"

He turned his head for the first time.

"The Eden Sequence," I said. "How many units are still in stock?"

Silence. That specific kind of silence — not him thinking, but him deciding whether to let me know what he was thinking.

"A hundred."

One per day. I ran the arithmetic in my head and kept everything off my face.

The Eden Sequence wasn't a drug in any conventional sense. It didn't treat a symptom or suppress a pathogen. What it did — what my mother had spent a decade engineering it to do — was intervene at the genetic expression level, temporarily inhibiting the cascade of misfiring neural signals that the Icarus Syndrome triggered as it progressed.

Every dose bought roughly twenty-four hours of neurological stability. Miss one, and the cascade resumed exactly where it had left off, accelerating each time it was interrupted and restarted, like a fault line that got a little less stable every time the pressure built and released.

The formula itself — the synthesis pathway, the precise molecular sequencing that made it work instead of just causing catastrophic immune response — was the part nobody had been able to replicate.

Three separate research teams had tried in the past four years, working from the recovered data, and all three had produced compounds that looked right on paper and killed the test subjects within seventy-two hours.

The problem wasn't the ingredients. The problem was the architecture. My mother had built something that only made sense inside her own head, and the only person left alive who understood how that head worked was sitting in the back of this car.

"Then a hundred days isn't the deadline you're giving me," I said. "It's your own."

He didn't deny it.

The highway lights were thinning out now, the edge of the city pulling back, darkness filling in. I stared at the stitching on the headrest in front of me and counted three rows of thread, then put that down.

"Then I need full lab access," I said. "A BSL-3 facility — not whatever basement you feel like pointing at. I need everything she left behind, even if it's just a sticky note. And —" I paused. "I need to go back to Westbridge University."

The temperature in the car seemed to drop another degree.

"Whatever you have on-site isn't going to cut it," I continued, keeping my voice level. "My mother's research sits at the intersection of neurobiology and synthetic chemistry. That means I need a BSL-3 containment setup, a full analytical suite — mass spec, NMR, the kind of equipment that costs eight figures and takes two years to calibrate.”

“Westbridge has it. Your people don't. You can build me a lab from scratch if you want, but that'll take longer than a hundred days just in procurement, and we both know it." I looked at him. "Sending me back to campus isn't a favor. It's the fastest path to what you need."

"You're not leaving."

"Then we both walk away with nothing when the hundred days run out."

I knew I'd crossed a line the second it came out. I didn't take it back. I just watched him and waited for his hand to move again, or for a gun to appear from somewhere.

He did something else instead.

The corner of his mouth pulled. Not a smile — just something in the neighborhood of one, like he'd heard something absurd that was barely worth finding funny. Then it was gone, and he turned back to the window.

"We'll see."