The lab always looks like it’s glowing at this hour. The pale concrete illuminated by ground lights. Those slit windows like shut eyes, black and lifeless. A puzzle box snapped shut.

I don’t see Zell’s dirt bike or Juwon’s sturdy Nissan. Dr. Severin’s grove-green Citroën is nowhere to be found. Alex’s car isn’t there either, and I can’t remember if I saw it earlier. I barely recall what it looks like, only that it was the Quietest Car in All the World. Sometimes he bikes, but the rack is empty. Sometimes he walks. You never know with Alex. Never knew.

It doesn’t matter anyway, I remind myself. He’s not going anywhere.

Heat rises fast under my eyes, and I try to stop it. There’s no time for it, no time to give myself over to any feeling at all.

Are you worried about the Russian?

Now I am, Diane. I can’t stop thinking about how unlike Serge it was to dump what he thought were animal carcasses in the bin when the policy was freezing and then special pickup or incineration. Might he have gone back for the bag?

This is Serge, after all, who cares deeply about the rules, about the order of the lab, at least his portion of it. The way he walks through the vivarium, headphones on, tending to his flock, like a bygone aristocrat strolling through his private gardens. Even when he must take the green-tagged mice to the carbon dioxide machine, he is so gentle and always gives them the iso first, sliding the needle into each one’s still-beating heart, no bigger than a kidney bean. Especially then. 

You alone understand the heart—that’s what Serge told me once, watching me scruff one of the mice and insert a needle into its tiny, bean-size ticker. The others are made of darker material.

But maybe that tenderness he reserves only for lab mice, his lab mice. Not dark, slippery rodents from the Chinese restaurant across the street, which can be tossed in the bin like he’d tossed the others through the incinerator door.

Or maybe, when he took the bag, he was too entranced with Diane to care. There was that way he was looking at her. So intently, those long-lashed eyes blinking slowly.

But I’m not sure. I’m not sure at all. Thinking of the bag sitting in that bin—do you see?

What if Serge went back for it? What if he looked inside?

Are you worried about the Russian?

She poured the poison in my ear and now I am inflamed.

Cameras are everywhere. They always are when your job is to flatten animals on tables, punch toxins deep inside. There have been protests, occasional vandalism.

There’s one in the lobby. Several in the parking lot.

And there’s a camera on the loading dock by the heavy iron door, which is where I’m heading. The tidy row of biohazard bins, those red stumps, their sides stamped with spiky symbols. Sharps, human fluids, liquid waste, mixed chemicals.

If I stay close enough to the right wall, the camera won’t find me.

Walking quickly, my arm scraping against the concrete, I arrive at the first bin, SOLID WASTE, the one that counts. I put my foot on its pedal; its lid pops open, the smell of bleach and plastic. Something else, sweet and strong. It seems to me the creak of the lid rings as loud as cathedral bells on an Easter morning.

Inside, it’s empty, gaping red, its molded plastic like bony tonsils.

No soiled and tugged gloves and bench paper, no clotted slides and caking petri dishes, the sealed bags of dark matter tossed daily from labs everywhere. And no large red biohazard bag, puffy with our sins. It’s not there.

They’re all empty, every one, lids snapping one after the other.

It’s not there, the bag.

They picked it up, I tell myself, walking away fast. It’s in the campus incinerator, burning to soot.

“Hey there!”

The high voice snaps like a rubber band. I stop midstride at the foot of the parking lot. A slender figure flits around one of the concrete pillars and heads toward me.

“I’m sorry!” A pitch of mild panic. “Can I ask you a question?”

For a second, I think it’s Maxim’s pale, neck-tattooed girlfriend hunting for her workaholic lover again. But this is a younger woman, a tall blonde in a cloud-colored sweater that drifts past her wrists—the kind of sweater you want to touch because it will feel like the ears of a bunny rabbit—and a moss-green scarf and ballet flats, a heavy diamond stud jabbed through each ear.

She approaches tentatively, then more swiftly.

“Oh, thank God,” she says. “You’re not Ted Bundy.”

I blink twice. “Pardon?”

“Sorry,” she says. “Isn’t Ted Bundy the one who prowled campuses, killing coeds?”

“Don’t they all kill coeds?”

She smiles, a nervous smile, the smile of someone who’s unused to being nervous. “Do you work in there? The lab?”

“Sorry,” I say. “Students can’t get in here on the weekends without an access card.”

“Oh, I’m not a student,” she says. “My fiancé works here.”

I look at her. She’s gripping her phone in her hand, her fingers red and tight.

“We had plans, and, well…” She can’t stop smiling, color soaring up her face. “I feel silly. I’m not that kind of fiancée.”

“What kind?”

“The kind who shows up at his job,” she says, showing more of her fine orthodontal work. “It’s just that he isn’t answering his phone. We were supposed to meet hours ago.”

The evening wind is whipping around the building now, our heads ducking beneath its shade fins. Up close, I see she’s maybe twenty-two with that kind of milky skin where any bit of pressure, any touch shows, blooming pink. I’m imagining art-gallery assistant, business-school student, fashion marketing.

“Who’s your fiancé?” My mouth is dry; my eyes too. My ankles tickle as if still speckled with blood.

She smiles again, a dimple emerging. “Alex Shaffer. He works in the Severin Lab. Maybe you know him?”

I pause, and, for a pulled-loose second, the wind cocooning us, I think I can hear both our hearts beating, hers like a little sparrow caught in a chimney, mine like an earthworm’s, wrapped around its own throat.

“Alex, sure.”

Her long sweater sleeve slides back as she reaches for her phone. That’s when I see the ring, its diamond fat and insistent.

“He left for work so early, part of me was afraid he was hit by a diesel truck or something. And what’s your name? He doesn’t talk much about the people at the lab. Except the Dragon Lady.”

“Dragon Lady?” I say, jaw tightening. “You mean Dr. Severin.”

She grins. “Sorry. That’s what he calls her. Alex is, you know—he doesn’t stand on ceremony.”

“Well, he’s probably just caught up in something,” I say. “I’d let you in, but I don’t have my card.”

“Oh,” she says, shoulders dropping slightly, her magnificent teeth disappearing. “So why are you here?”

“Just heading to the library,” I say. “You should go home.”

She nods, wilting further. A buttercup. For all her height, those long legs, and those long, bolt-bright locks, that’s what she is.

An impossible mix of feelings floats through me.

“I guess you’re right,” she says, sliding her phone into her pocket at last. “What’s your name again? I’m Eleanor.”

“You know what, Eleanor?” I say, not answering, swinging my backpack over my shoulder. “I bet he’s on his way home now.”

At home, I lie in the bath for an hour, adding hot water every fifteen minutes.

A fiancée. A fiancée.

Ms. Owens, you can see how this looks. That’s what the police would say, wouldn’t they? You have your rendezvous with Shaffer, then—what, you found out he was engaged? Or did you know all along, demand he break it off?

But that’s only if they find out about Alex and me. And no one knows about that. Well, two people. One is dead. The other is Diane.

I turn on my phone for the first time in hours, fingers shaking. But there are still no calls, no panicky voice mails, no lab text alerts.

But there is an e-mail. It’s from Dr. Severin, who has never e-mailed me, ever. It says:

Make sure you’re in by nine tomorrow. We need to get started.

(Yes, that’s a hint.)

Maybe it’s a moment of relief from the shock and tremors of the last two days, maybe it’s the churn and froth of last night’s beer still roiling through me, or maybe it’s the eternal mystery of the neurons firing scattershot in my head, but I can’t help but feel something lift inside of me.

I may be smiling, just for a minute. A long, long amoral minute.

All my life, I’ve only seen as much as a keyhole allows, side glances, small corners of something larger, some massive vision. But Dr. Severin—whose brain is immense and, it seems to me, very beautiful; no, sublime, beyond my reckoning—is able to see things I long to see, overarching networks, grand symphonies of the body, the brain, the genes, and the blood. Reproductive hormones and serotonin, stress hormones and neurotransmitters. The whole rickety biological pathophysiology of our women. The PMDD women, maybe all women. She sees the dangerous relays in the suffering body. She understands the mad pulses of the blood.

But to understand, you need to see so much more. Because everything affects everything else. One small speck in one narrow recess and everything else is dark with its shadow. And working with Dr. Severin, I know I’ll see it all. And I’ll be a part of the grander seeing, the illumination of darkness.

The hand outstretched to all those women in the shadows. Come with me, come, come.

Dr. Severin beckoning me so that we both may beckon them.

And I think of my mom and one of our last conversations, in the dusty hospice room, the skin under her fingernails darkening.

I always knew you could do important things, big things. Anything at all. I always knew.

I just wasn’t sure you did.

Mom, I didn’t know. But now I do. And Mom, I can do this. I can. I can I can I can.