Nora opened the drawer. The felt lining was dark green, the kind of lining put in drawers that held things worth protecting. There was an indentation in it, the compressed oval of something that had sat in the same position long enough to leave its shape behind. The drawer was empty. “Annotated methodology,” Nora said. “USB drive. I kept it here because it was the version I was actively working from.” She looked at the indentation. “The underlying data matches what I gave you. The annotations don’t. They’re my reasoning notes. The trial design decisions, the sequencing logic, the modifications between phases.” Adrian looked at the indentation. “How much of the methodology is in what you handed me,” he said. “The conclusions. Not the construction.” He closed the drawer. He took her out through the service corridor on the building’s south side, the one that exited onto the street the research wing backed onto rather than the car park. Mira’s layout diagram had shown it. He had no

The apartment smelled of something cooking that had been cooking for a while. Adrian set his keys on the counter and stood in the entrance for a moment. The kitchen light was on. The lamp in the sitting room was on. The bedroom door was open at the angle Diana left it when she was moving between rooms and expected to return. She came out of the kitchen when she heard him. “I wasn’t sure when you’d be back,” she said. The warmth arrived correctly, the specific warmth of someone who had not been waiting in any way that could be named as waiting. “A meeting ran,” Adrian said. “Nothing resolved.” She looked at him for a moment and then turned back toward the kitchen. “Have you eaten?” “Not properly.” “Then sit down.” He sat at the table and she brought things through in the unhurried way of someone for whom this was ordinary, because for eight months it had been. The meal was further along than an hour’s notice would have produced. He noted the timing and set it beside everything e

Mira picked up before the first ring completed. “Dorian’s personal calendar,” Adrian said. “Next forty-eight hours. Anything not routed through his executive assistant.” “Give me ten minutes.” He drove. The medical district moved past the windows in the specific way it moved in the morning, purposeful and indifferent, the buildings holding their ordinary functions while the folder sat on the passenger seat with the weight of something that had changed the shape of everything it was adjacent to. Mira called back in eight. “Lunch,” she said. “Private booking. Restaurant in the northern quarter. Today. In eighty minutes.” “Which channel.” “His personal line. Not the office system.” Adrian looked at the road ahead. “Thank you,” he said, and ended the call. He did not go to the restaurant. He parked in the building’s lower level and took the elevator to the thirty-eighth floor and walked through Dorian’s outer office past the executive assistant, who stood and began a sentence t

The folder was where he had left it. He had been at the table for forty minutes when Mira called. The city outside the window was still deciding about the morning, the light coming in gray and provisional, the medical district not yet running at its full register. He answered and said nothing. “Caroline Halsey,” Mira said. He waited. “Overnight. An email from an address in the communications subsidiary — the one that runs through Brennan’s executive committee infrastructure, not the main directory. Sent to a contact in the former regulatory affairs network.” A pause that was not hesitation. “Flagging the name as a potential Voss-Cole hire. Asking for background.” Adrian looked at the table. “Time stamp,” he said. “Eleven forty-two.” He had placed the name at dinner. Diana had absorbed it without visible storage and passed it in under five hours. And it had not gone to Dorian. It had gone to Brennan. “Nothing else,” Mira said. “Thank you,” he said, and ended the call. He set

The western quarter moved past the car’s windows in the specific way it moved when you were not looking at it. Adrian had been to this part of the city twice before his disappearance, both times for reasons that had nothing to do with the building he was now pulling up in front of. He knew it by its absence of signage rather than its presence. One door, dark wood, a number above it in brass small enough that you had to already know the address to confirm you had the right place. The kind of building that had decided long ago that the people who needed to find it would find it and the people who didn’t were not its concern. He went in at eight fifty. The person who met him inside asked no questions. He was shown to a room on the building’s second floor, paneled in the particular dark wood that communicated age rather than style, a single window overlooking a courtyard that the street had no sight line into. A table. Four chairs. A carafe of water that had been placed recently enough