The Last Night

The kitchen door was already open when they came around the side of the house, and Odáliz Reyes went through it first, without turning to see whether they were following.

Odáliz Reyes had kept the house for nineteen years, which meant she had keys, and codes, and the schedule of the cleaning crew written on the inside of her wrist in biro. At nine on Thursday night she let them in through the kitchen, and at ten past nine the three of them were standing in the corridor outside the clean room, listening.

Inside, someone was talking.

Not to them. The voice was pleasant and reasonable and it went on and on without ever stopping for a breath, the way a man talks when he has an audience of one and the one is himself, and every few sentences it laughed at something it had said. Under the voice, another sound: a soft, patient, metallic clicking, which she would understand only much later was the empty autoinjector being turned over and over in one hand.

Then the clicking stopped, and the pleasant voice stopped with it, and a different voice — the older one, the tired one she had last heard across a restaurant table in March — said, quite clearly, through the door: "Odáliz. You brought them."

Theo went first. He put his hand flat on the door, looked back at the two of them once, and went in.

The clean room was white and the light was white and the smell was sweet, chemical, wrong. The stainless cabinet stood open. Beside it, on the floor, in a position the human body does not adopt voluntarily, lay Dexter Rourke. He had been dead some hours and not gently. Whatever had happened had happened in this room, and had taken its time.

And in the corner, against the wall, on the floor, sat Adrian Voss.

He was old again. He was smaller than she remembered, and every year of sixty-one was on him at once, and he was holding an empty glass autoinjector in both hands the way a child holds a shell. He looked up at Nora and his eyes were wet and ordinary and it was the most ordinary thing in the room.

"It ran out," he said.

"Adrian."

"It ran out and the second batch was wrong. The first batch was impure — that was the whole secret, the impurity, the mistake in the synthesis, that's what made it work — and the second batch was clean, and clean is a door that only opens outward." He laughed, which turned into something that was not laughing, and he pressed the empty injector against his palm until his hand closed. "I've been in that chair for two days. I can't go back. I can't die. Do you understand how funny that is? I've spent thirty years trying to correct the body's one mistake, and I've corrected it, and it won't let me leave."

"Where is the compound."

"There is no compound. There is no compound because I made it, and I made it in my hands, and the hands are the problem." He looked over at the body on the floor and his face did something complicated. "Don't let them take the drive from the kitchen. Odáliz, don't let them — tell her —"

Odáliz Reyes was already in the kitchen. She came back with a small matte-black drive in her fist, unlabeled, the kind that comes in a padded envelope from a distributor, and she put it in Nora's hand and closed Nora's fingers around it with both of hers. "I went to her house on Tuesday," she said. "The jar was where she said it would be. It's hers. The doctor's. She left flour on it."

"I want a lawyer," Voss said, from the floor, in a perfectly clear voice. "I want a lawyer, and a doctor, and I want the lights off. Nora. Nora, turn the lights off."

They turned the lights off. He was still talking when they went out. He was still there when the police came, and he was still there at four in the morning, when the white room was full of people who all had their own ideas about what he was.