It’s a relief to be away from Diane, to be in a room of men, a lab stuffed with them, and everything so bare and simple and plain, including the openly jealous glares Irwin’s postdocs are giving me: She’s one of the chosen ones, the one on the grant five times the size of ours.

I’m standing at my bench, earbuds in, looking at my cell cultures through the microscope. Behind me, Zell and Maxim are talking. They haven’t stopped. They no longer care about work now that the competition has ended, now that they have lost, so why not talk?

“So did you see him on Saturday?” Zell asks Maxim. “Don’t you usually come in?”

“Not this weekend,” he says. “Family wedding.”

“So it was just Kit and Shaffer here,” Zell says.

I look up. “And Diane,” I say. “Don’t forget Diane.”

Zell nods, lifting his eyebrows. “I never even knew Shaffer had a girlfriend,” he says, eyes still on me.

“Fiancée,” Maxim corrects. “Knowing Shaffer, she’s some big shot’s daughter.”

 I expect it from Zell, but this is new for Maxim. Or is it? I wonder. Now that the team is in place, the mask comes off, and the gloves.

We’re a nest of vipers.

I reach down and turn up the music louder, my fingers pressing my earbuds hard into my ears. So hard I can’t hear anything but my own neurons firing, like static on an old radio.

There is no hiding in the ladies’ room today. When I walk out of the stall, Eleanor is at the sink, touching her face, like she doesn’t quite understand what’s happened to it. That look of fear, panic. It’s as if she’s never felt it before.

“Hi.”

“Hey,” I reply. “I didn’t know you were still here.”

“I’m not going anywhere,” Eleanor says. “Not until I find Alex.”

There’s a new firmness about her now. And a chilliness.

“Do you have family here? Someone to…help?”

“They’re back east. It’s just me and Alex.” She looks at me. “Didn’t he ever mention me?”

I turn the water on, glance away from her. Shake my hands dry. “We don’t really do that here,” I say. “Talk about our home lives.”

She nods. “Mano a mano. With an emphasis on man.”

I pause and then can’t stop myself. “Did he talk about us?”

She looks at me distractedly, both of us moving to the door. “A little. Just little things.”

“Well, there’s not much to—”

“He said you were Dr. Severin’s favorite.”

I stop. “He did?”

She nods again. “And he told me this story about how you won a car once. Some kind of contest for who could keep their hand on it the longest. You made it something like three days.”

“Fifty-six hours,” I say. I’d forgotten I’d shared that story with him.

“He told me that said everything about you he needed to know.”

I swing open the door, trying not to look her. A hard worker, a good little worker bee.

“Well,” I say, “last man standing is sometimes a woman.”

She tries for a smile. “My lab was the same way. Mano a mano, like I said.”

As we step into the hallway, I try to recover. “You’re at a lab?”

“Not right now. I’m on fellowship.”

“Really?” I say. So much for gallery assistant, jewelry designer, trust-fundee, whatever I’d imagined. “I mean, studying what?”

But Eleanor is distracted, looking up, her eyes catching on one of the mounted cameras. Staring into it. This is something some people do when they visit the lab, so I’ve gotten used to it. It has to do with all the cameras, the age-specked convex mirrors like bug eyes. The buzzing and sibilance and the slow shimmy-shimmy of centrifuges, the constant hush. All the visitors fear they’re being watched. Because they are.

“Theoretical physics,” she says finally. “Dark energy.”

“Dark energy,” I say. “We don’t really know what that is, right?”

Eleanor nods, eyes still fixed on the camera. “I had a professor once who called it the bone in our throat. But that’s what I like about it. We keep trying and trying, and getting everything wrong.”

“All those eyes on the sky,” I say, my voice small and breathless. Thinking about the cameras and everything that’s been seen and everything that’s hidden.

“There’s so many questions we try to find answers to. We lead studies, we get these grants, like your grant. All these little steps. But it doesn’t really change anything.”

“I don’t think I agree,” I say. “Our grant—”

“But dark energy,” Eleanor continues, finally looking at me, eyes glassy, sleepless, “we have to figure that one out.” When she talks, I can see the pink inside of her mouth, full of health. “Before it swallows us.”

Back in G-21, no one is getting any work done. Diane, now returned, is filling out her paperwork at her bench. If I squint, I can see her pen shaking slightly in her hand. Juwon has been making phone calls in the lounge, even taking one at his own lab bench a few moments ago, his laptop hot and charging.

“He’ll have a new job by midnight,” Zell says to me, playing with his phone, which keeps making small explosions. “I heard him tell his wife he sure as hell doesn’t intend to spend the next two years shooting ferrets full of testosterone to see how long it takes to make their dicks hard.”

I’ve never heard Juwon say anything like that, or even complain once, but now it seems all our masks have fallen, and do I really know any of these guys?

They surely don’t know me.

Maxim returns from his supervision meeting with news.

“They looked at the lobby camera from Saturday,” he says. “They can’t find any footage of him leaving the building.”

Juwon shrugs. “That’s not that strange. I don’t always go through the lobby. Fire exit, loading dock. It’s hard to get inside the lab on the weekends, but it’s not hard to leave.”

This is true. Fire doors are often propped open by smokers. Sometimes, when I’m over in the more lax academic wing, I exit there. Sometimes, following someone else, I don’t bother to swipe my card.

“Well, they’ll have to look at all the cameras,” Maxim says. “But they’re pretty old. I suggested last year that they replace them. Some are still coated in dust from the last renovations.”

“You see that one in the neuro wing that hangs funny?” Zell asks. “I heard someone bent it so they could have sex in the lab.”

I swear, he looks at me as he says it.

“But what do you suppose he’s up to?” Maxim wonders. “What reason does a guy like that have to fly the coop?”

“Sidepiece,” Zell says. “Old story, ain’t it? Weekend sex jag.”

Talking hard-boiled, like a pair of skells, rather than two postdocs whose only crime is likely Zell’s regularly absconding with Erlenmeyer flasks for his home brew.

Zell grins. “I heard the girlfriend—the fiancée—talking to the head of security. That guy with the mustache that always looks wet.”

“Yeah?”

I can feel Diane looking at me now. Watching.

“She went to Alex’s apartment. His mail from Saturday was still stuck in the slot. There were still old grounds in the coffeemaker. Everything’s untouched.”

“Is that supposed to be a sign he’s gone?” Juwon says, rolling his eyes. “Three months here, guy hasn’t cleaned a beaker yet.”

“Well, the fiancée had a lot to say about it, to the guard, to Severin. You could hear her concerns all the way down the hall. Guess Shaffer likes a big mouth. Or lungs.”

“He’s a lung man, yeah.”

“Maybe he’s one of those guys with two lives,” Zell says, practically rubbing his hands. The lab has never been so exciting for him as it is today. “Back in New Haven, my PI got caught banging two underage Russian girls in a parking structure downtown. They found two hundred thousand dollars cash in his trunk. Turned out he’d been selling trade secrets to the Chinese for years. Sneaking antibodies out of the lab at night in Styrofoam containers.”

“Is Serge off today?” Juwon asks, ignoring Zell. “I need to see if my new embryos arrived.”

It’s hard to believe no one’s asked about Serge yet, but he’s a tech and postdocs don’t think of techs until they need their logs, their tail biopsies. Or unless there’s mice falling from the ceiling. I look down at my cells, cloudy and maybe contaminated, and pretend not to hear, but blood is roaring through my brain.

“Maybe he and Alex ran away together,” Zell says.

“He’s at the dentist,” I say quietly as Diane passes, heading for the door.

“You mean Serge wasn’t Alex’s sidepiece?” Zell says, grinning at me. “I wonder who it was, then.”

It seems like he’s going to say more, but at that moment, Diane drops all her papers onto the floor.

“Sorry,” she says as Zell bends over to help her. Maxim does too.

I watch them.

“Zell, if any of your Alex theories are true,” Maxim says, “it’d be a surprise to me. He doesn’t seem half smart enough.”

“Yeah,” Juwon says, grimmer by the minute. “He’s much smarter when he’s not here.”

Afternoon gives over to evening and everyone scatters. I head for the vivarium wing. Through the windows, I spot two of Serge’s techs closing things up for the day. One of them sees me and waves forlornly.

We miss Serge too, he mouths. At least that’s what I think he says. He knows how often I make excuses to be here. To follow Serge on his rounds. To sit in the quiet, enjoy the classical music Serge pipes through the cages.

But I’m not there because I miss him. I’m there because of that red biohazard bag, that unfortunate meeting, my ankles stippled with blood.

I picture him in the padded dentist’s chair, paper bib and rubber mask. The shush-shush of the gas tank, the narcotic haze darkening his dark, dark eyes. Serge, who gently anesthetizes his brood before tail biopsies, or euthanization. I imagine him leaning back into the starry expanse of the nitrous oxide and worrying about his mice, the fleecy legions of them, and even the rats.

It’s only when I’m sliding my access card into the elevator again that I hear the low, husky whistle. And, out of the corner of my eye, see him. The dark, slender figure, an aristocratic vampire, or the Cat, as Alex dubbed him.

“Serge!” I call out, turning fast.

But it’s a trick of the light, my own reflection on the elevator doors. No one’s there.

In the ladies’ room, in the smeary mirror, my eyes are bagged, saggy pillows, my pupils pinned.

I can smell the chloroform again, even though it’s nowhere to be found.

I sit down on the vinyl bench, a throwback to another era when ladies’ rooms were powder rooms, salons, places where women made and remade themselves over atomizer huffs and confidences.

I close my eyes.

When you’re in the sciences, when you know about things like neuronal biochemistry and the complex interplay between, say, hormones and emotion, you might imagine you have a deep understanding of the mind. Explain to me why I feel this way, think this way, dream this way, am this way.

But consider it: Would you really want to know?

When I open my eyes again, Diane is at the sink, just where Eleanor stood a few hours ago.

“I thought it was gone forever,” she murmurs, her fingers to her face at the mirror. Just like Eleanor, I think. Am I dreaming?

“What? Diane, I—”

“Who told you that I worked in Dr. Severin’s lab before?” she asks, as if we’ve been talking a long time. “I need to know who told you that.”

I look at her. “I saw it on your CV.”

She holds my gaze a minute. Something seems off. Or more off. The odd way her fingertips keep touching her face. The blackness of her eyes, so black no white could squeak through.

“I have to go,” I say, rising from the bench.

“Kit, you have to understand: I was fixing it for you, for both of us.”

“I never asked you to fix anything,” I say.

“You’ve always been scared to say what you want,” she says, the words coming slow and deliberate. “To admit all the things you want.”

“You don’t know me—”

“And when you finally do, you hide from it. You deny it. You think it doesn’t touch you.” Her face fills with something like feeling. “But Kit, it does.”

“Don’t talk to me like this,” I say. “I never killed anyone. We are not the same. You’re a killer.” I almost gasp with pleasure from saying it aloud, something so big and final.

She looks at us both in the mirror, her eyes like two dank caverns. I get the feeling I used to have when I opened my grandma’s cellar door, the smell down there, the smell of earth, mushroomy, ancient, and stinking of mortality. I used to cover my mouth the whole time I was in it. She buried all her ex-husbands down there, my dad used to say. Watch out for the bony edges.

“You do something bad,” she says. “Very bad. You can’t even really believe you did it. You wait for your punishment for a long time. You expect it. You wait every day.”

She looks down at her hands, then up again. From the hallway, I can hear the elevator’s ding. Its doors open and shut.

“But then nothing happens. Your life continues. Except you’re not a part of it, really. You go forward, you have experiences. But they don’t touch you. You’re watching them from the outside. It’s like you’re a ghost haunting your own life.”

“Don’t try to make me feel sorry for you, Diane,” I say. “Because I don’t.”

She gives me a funny look. “I hope you never do,” she says softly.

I reach for the door handle.

“Kit, wait. I need to ask you something.”

“What?”

“Alex. He’s the only one you told, right? About me.”

“Why,” I say, my voice with a funny shiver in it, “would I want anyone else to know?”

The door whooshes shut behind me.

Turning, I think I see a shadow at the far end of the hall. Hear the slow click-click of expensive boots.