Maren looked at the syringe.
It was small. Clinical. The amber liquid caught the light from the terminal screen and refracted it into a dull gold point at the needle's tip. It was, by any objective measure, a minor thing a few milliliters of chemistry in a standardized delivery device, the kind of object that was so common in laboratories that it was essentially invisible.
But this syringe was not common. This syringe was the end of the argument Maren had been having with herself since the morning she couldn't find the aquarium photos. The argument about certainty. The argument about whether a life built on verifiable data was a life worth living, or whether it was a cage made of the same bars that protected it.
Lena was offering an answer. A clean one. Take the dose. Let the chemistry rewrite the night. Go home with a smooth, comfortable version of the truth. Sleep. Wake up believing that the worst was over and that Sollen's intentions were good and that Maren's role in the story was a supporting one the brilliant scientist who did her work and asked no further questions and kept her daughter and her career and the clean, organized life she'd built from the wreckage of her marriage and the ambition of her mind.
It was a reasonable offer. It had always been a reasonable offer. That was the genius of it and of Lena, who understood that the most effective prison is one the prisoner builds and furnishes herself.
97%...
"Think about Alma," Lena said. Her voice was low, steady, the voice of a woman who had run this scenario in her head and rehearsed the right words. "If you walk out of here with that data, you're not just fighting Sollen. You're fighting a custody battle. You're fighting a defamation campaign. You're fighting the legal resources of a company valued at fourteen billion dollars. And you'll be fighting it with compromised credibility because you broke into a secured lab at 2 a.m. to steal proprietary data. That's not whistleblowing, Maren. That's espionage."
"I didn't sign up for memory modification. I signed up for a sleep study."
"You signed a general consent for experimental procedures as part of your employment onboarding. It's buried in the paperwork, but it's legally defensible."
"Legally defensible isn't the same as ethical."
"In front of a jury, it's close enough."
Maren looked at the progress bar.
98%...
She looked at Henrik. He was pressed against the far wall, his back against the concrete, his hands flat at his sides, his face white with a fear so total it had looped around into a kind of stillness the stillness of a man who has accepted that the next thirty seconds will determine the trajectory of his life and has decided to be present for it rather than to run.
She looked at Lena. At the syringe. At the medical case on Bed 3. At the twelve dark beds where fourteen people had slept while their minds were opened and filled and sealed again.
She thought about the aquarium. The blue light. The whale turning. The memory so vivid, so warm, so specific that it had lived in her identity for nineteen months as autobiography as something she'd done, something she'd felt, something she'd shared with her daughter on a Saturday that never happened.
She thought about cranberry sauce. About a green cardigan. About the sound of a Portuguese lullaby that now lived in Henrik's head because someone had decided her grandmother's voice was useful content.
She thought about Dolores, pressing her hand below her left collarbone, locating a grief that had been installed without consent.
And she thought about Alma. Not the memory of Alma the fact of her. The present-tense, currently-sleeping, crayon-wielding, pigeon-theorizing, whale-loving fact of her daughter, who existed not as a file in Maren's hippocampus but as a person in the world, with her own memories, her own fears, her own yellow rain boots with the small penguins, and whose right to know her mother as a whole, honest, complicated woman was not something that could be edited or compressed or overwritten.
99%...
"I'd rather not know who I am," Maren said, "than let you decide for me."
Lena's face changed. Not dramatically a shift in the tectonic layer beneath the performance, a movement of the bedrock. The warmth flickered. What was underneath was not anger, exactly. It was the look of a woman who had run out of scripts.
100%.
The progress bar filled. The transfer completed. The terminal chimed a soft, democratic beep, the kind of sound that meant nothing to the machine and everything to the two people standing in front of it.
Maren pulled the USB drive.
She held it in her closed fist small, warm, heavy with eight hundred megabytes of evidence that could end Sollen Pharmaceuticals and put Lena Voss in federal prison and change the way the world thought about sleep and memory and consent.
Lena stood. She was still holding the syringe.
"You're making a mistake."
"Probably."
"You'll lose Alma."
"Maybe."
"You'll lose everything."
Maren looked at her at this woman who had been her mentor and her handler and her jailer, who had sat across from her in bars and boardrooms and spoken her name with the specific inflection of someone who owned it and she said: "I've already lost things I didn't know I had. You took them while I slept. I'm done losing things in the dark."
She turned to Henrik. "Go."
Henrik moved. He peeled himself off the wall and walked to the door with the rigid, mechanical stride of a body obeying a command that the brain hasn't fully endorsed. Maren followed. She did not run. She walked out of the Phase 0 lab at the pace of a woman who had made a decision and was not going to let urgency erode its dignity.
At the door, she paused. She turned back.
Lena was standing beside Bed 3, the syringe in one hand, the medical case in the other, her coat over her arm. The posture of a woman who has been left on a stage after the scene has ended and is not sure whether to take a bow or call for the curtain.
"You should know," Maren said, "that I've already arranged to deliver this data to a journalist and a federal prosecutor. If anything happens to me, to Henrik, or to any subject in this trial, the story runs without us."
Lena said nothing. Her face, for the first time since Maren had known her, showed nothing at all. Not warmth. Not anger. Not calculation. Just the blank screen of a woman who had bet on certainty and lost.
Maren walked out. The door closed behind her with its soft pneumatic hiss.
The corridor was empty. The caged lights hummed. The concrete walls held the cold and the silence with the patience of underground spaces, which existed before humans needed them and would exist after humans left.
They walked to the freight elevator. They did not speak.