The Chemist

Of course, this diagnosis also applied to herself; she’d been out of touch with normal life for much longer than Daniel had. While that meant she was used to the lack, it also meant that she’d been starved of human contact for a very long time. Maybe this was why she felt so improbably comforted whenever he touched her.

“I don’t think it’s a bad thing,” she answered him. “It’s natural that you’d need space to deal with all of this.”

He laughed once, a darker sound than his earlier fit of hysteria. “Except that I don’t need space from anyone but him.” He sighed. “Kev has always been like that, even when we were kids. Has to be in charge, has to have the spotlight.”

“Funny traits for a spy.”

“I guess he’s figured out a way to suppress those instincts when he’s working – and then it all comes surging out when he’s not.”

“I wouldn’t know anything about it. Only child.”

“Lucky, lucky you.” He sighed again.

“He’s probably not so bad.” Why was she defending Kevin? she wondered. Just trying to cheer Daniel up, maybe. “If you weren’t stuck in this very extreme situation, he’d be easier to deal with.”

“That’s fair. I should try to be fair. I guess I’m just… angry. So angry. I know he didn’t mean to do it, but his life choices have suddenly destroyed all of mine. That’s so… Kevin.”

“It takes a while to accept what has happened to you,” Alex said slowly. “You’ll probably stay angry, but it gets easier. Most of the time, I forget how angry I am. It’s different for me, though. It was people I didn’t know very well who did this to me. It wasn’t my family.”

“But your enemies actually tried to kill you. That’s worse; don’t even try to compare what happened to you to what’s happening to me. Kevin never meant to hurt me. It’s just hard, you know? I feel like I’ve died, but I have to keep on living anyway. I don’t know how.”

She patted his left hand on the rail, remembering how that had made her feel better in the car. The skin over his knuckles was stretched tight.

“You’ll learn, like I did. It turns into a routine. The life you had before gets… dimmer. And you get philosophical. I mean, disasters happen to people all the time. What’s the difference between this and having your nation overrun by guerrilla warfare, right? Or your town destroyed by a tsunami? Everything changes, and nothing is as safe as it was. Only that safety was always just an illusion anyway… Sorry, that might just be the world’s crappiest pep talk.”

He laughed. “Not the very crappiest. I do feel infinitesimally better.”

“Well, then I guess my job here is done.”

“How did you get started with all this?” The question rolled out lightly, as if it were a simple thing.

She hesitated. “What do you mean?”

“Why did you choose this… profession? Before they tried to kill you, I mean. Were you in the military? Did you volunteer?”

Again, the questions were spoken lightly, like he was inquiring how she had become a financial planner or an interior decorator. The very lack of emotion was its own tell. He kept his face forward, staring out into the darkness.

She didn’t evade this time. She would want to know this, too, if fate had saddled her with one of her peers as a companion. It was something she’d asked Barnaby in the early days of their association. His answer wasn’t much different from hers.

“I never actually chose it,” she explained slowly. “And no, I wasn’t military. I was in medical school when they approached me. I’d first been interested in pathology, but then I shifted focus. I was deep into a particular vein of research – you could call it a kind of chemical mind control, I guess. There weren’t many people doing precisely what I was doing, and there were a lot of roadblocks in my way – funding, tools, test subjects… well, most of it came down to funding. The professors I was working under didn’t even fully understand my research, so I didn’t have a lot of help.

“These mysterious government officials showed up and offered me an opportunity. They picked up the tab for my massive student loans. I got to finish my schooling while focusing my research toward my new handlers’ goals. When I graduated, I went to work in their lab, where every technology I could dream of was at my disposal and money was never an object.

“It was obvious what they had me creating. They didn’t lie to me. I was aware of the work I was contributing to, but it sounded noble, the way they described it. I was helping my country…”

He waited, still staring ahead.

“I didn’t think I would be the one who would actually use my creations on a subject. I thought I would just be supplying the tools they needed…” She shook her head back and forth slowly. “It didn’t work like that, though. The antibodies I’d created were too specialized – the doctor who administered them had to understand how they worked. So that left exactly one person.”

The hand on the small of her back didn’t move – it was too still, frozen in place.

“The only person ever inside the interrogation room with me, besides the subject, was Barnaby. At first, he handled the questioning. He frightened me in the beginning, but he turned out to be such a gentle person… We were mostly in the lab, creating and developing. Actual interrogations made up only about five percent of my job.” She took a deep breath. “But often, when there was a crisis at hand, they needed to be running multiple interrogations simultaneously; speed was always critical. I had to be able to work alone. I didn’t want to do it, but I understood why it needed to be that way.