Chapter One: Anna
What He'd Burn
I pushed through GeneMark’s glass doors at 7:43, seventeen minutes late. The lobby was aggressively overheated the way it always was in the winter, creating a brutal contrast to the winds outside. I was already peeling off my coat before I made it to reception.
“Anna!” Marcus called from his office before I’d made it three steps past his door. “Can you come here for a second?”
I dropped my bag at my station and walked over, cataloging excuses as I went. The bus. The headache I’d had since four in the morning. The fact that I’d been awake since 5:47 and hadn’t had coffee. None of them would matter. Marcus had heard them all.
“Close the door,” he said, which was never good.
I closed it.
He leaned back in his chair, studying me over his glasses. Thirty-two but dressed like someone’s dad: khakis, button-down, sensible shoes. He’d been my supervisor for two years, which meant he knew exactly how close to the edge I was running at any given moment.
Apparently closer than I’d thought, based on the look on his face.
“You look exhausted,” he said, not unkindly.
“I’m fine.”
“Anna.”
“I said I’m fine.” I crossed my arms. “What do you need?”
He sighed. We’d done this dance enough times for him to know when to push and when to back off. “I need you to run the Carstairs batch again. Something’s off with the resonance readings.”
“Which markers?”
“Elemental affinity panel. The client’s convinced she’s got latent pyrokinesis because her grandmother could light candles with her mind.”
We both knew what that meant. Mrs. Carstairs’ grandmother had probably had an affinity for minor combustion magic, which had approximately zero genetic predictability according to every legitimate study ever conducted. We would charge her four hundred dollars to tell her she might have a two-percent higher chance than the general population of learning fire manipulation. If she spent ten years training. If she had the right teacher. The statistical model we were using was garbage designed to make people feel special. I knew that and yet was complicit because I had student loans to pay.
At least the aptitude panels were relatively harmless nonsense. The new divison was worse. Maybond Compatibility Research, they called it. Trying to break down the chemistry of fated mate bonds, looking for biological markers and cellular reactions between potential mates. Pseudo-research dressed up in scientific language, all so GeneMark could sell compatibility tests to people desperate enough to pay for answers about destiny.
My mother had spent my entire childhood chasing a fated mate bond she never found, leaving me alone for days at a time while she searched bars and parties and speed-dating events for that connection. The cosmic lottery, people called it. The idea that somewhere out there was a person whose touch would rewrite your biology, whose bond would give your existence meaning. It was nonsense. A way to surrender your culpability and never have to make a hard choice.
Ninety-four percent satisfaction rate among confirmed pairs. That was the statistic everyone cited. What they didn’t mention was how rare the bonds were, or what happened to the people who spent their whole lives searching and never found one. People who let the possibility of a bond become more real than the life they were supposed to be living.
The idea that GeneMark was trying to monetize that desperation made my skin crawl. I wanted out but that would have to wait.
“I’ll get it done,” I said, already moving toward the door.
Marcus didn’t dismiss me. Just sat there with that expression like he was calculating whether I’d make it to lunch. “Anna, have you thought about what we discussed? About cutting back your hours?”
“I can’t afford to cut back my hours.”
“You can’t afford to burn out either.”
I rolled my eyes. The irony of discussing burnout while rerunning a pyrokinesis panel wasn’t lost on me. “Is there anything else, or can I get to work?”
He held up his hands. “Just take care of yourself.”
I left before he could say anything else, closing the door harder than necessary. The kind of exit that said I’m fine and totally have this under control.
The centrifuge was already running when I got to my station. I pulled on gloves and started dripping samples into the test array, each one a tiny act of routine that required just enough focus to be exhausting but not enough to be interesting. This was the part of lab work no one told you about when you decided to pursue science. Mostly it was repetition. Precision. The kind of meticulous work that wore you down until you couldn’t remember why you’d thought this mattered.
Forty-seven samples down. Fifty-three to go.
I reached for the next vial and felt a sharp sting across my palm. A crack in the glass had caught my skin, opening a thin red line.
I pressed my thumb against the cut, feeling the warm trickle. Without really thinking about it, I let my awareness sink into the wound. The same way I’d been doing since I was twelve. My low level healing came as naturally as breathing. I could feel the torn capillaries, the disrupted cells, the minor damage my body would take days to fix on its own.
I guided the cells back together, knitting the edges. The sting faded to nothing. When I pulled my thumb away, there was blood on my skin but no wound beneath it.
Ten seconds and a paper towel. It was like nothing had happened.
This was the easy stuff. Surface damage, minor injuries. I could heal a cut without concentrating, fix a bruise while carrying on a conversation.
But healing cancer? Understanding why cells forgot how to die, how to target the malignant ones without destroying everything around them? That required training I didn’t have. Knowledge I couldn’t access without my degree. Skills that existed in labs I couldn’t get into because every path there cost money or time or both, and I was short on each.
By 11:30, I’d finished the Carstairs analysis and processed sixteen new samples. Results: inconclusive, which we’d translate to “possible minor affinity” for the report. I clocked out at one.
Biochemistry was taught by Dr. Patricia Richmond, who had two PhDs, four ex-husbands, and zero patience for students who hadn’t done the reading. I idolized her.
“Enzyme kinetics!” she announced, striding into the lecture hall at exactly 3:15. “Who can tell me why the Michaelis–Menten equation is both brilliant and fundamentally flawed?”
The room fillled with the silence of seventy students trying to disappear.
I raised my hand.
“Ms. Iverson. Enlighten us.”
“It assumes steady-state conditions and a single substrate binding to a single enzyme. The equation works beautifully in a controlled environment, but falls apart in real biological systems where you have multiple substrates, competitive inhibitors, and allosteric regulation happening simultaneously.”
“Exactly.” She swept her pointer finger around the room accusingly. “Seventy of you, and only one bothered to think about what the equation means instead of memorizing it.”
She launched into the lecture. This was my favorite part of any day. For ninety minutes I got to tune out the rest of the world and listen to one of the most brililant women I’d ever met speak to my soul.
As Dr. Richmond worked through substrate binding and reaction rates with genuine enthusiasm, I felt the numbers come to life. I had resonance senitivity. An affinity that let me understand almost intuitively how molecules fit together, the subtle shifts as enzymes changed shape, the patterns that emerged when reactions crossed a threshold. But intuition wasn’t enough. It didn’t mean anything without knowledge, without understanding why. That was what the degree was for. How to take those flashes of understanding and turn them into something precise, repeatable, and useful.
I also liked equations because they were honest. They didn’t care what you wanted. They didn’t soften their conclusions. If you understood the system well enough, the answer revealed itself whether you were ready or not. That was comforting. The idea that the world was governed by rules you could learn. That chaos was just ignorance with better marketing.
Maya caught me on the way out of the lecture hall, falling into step with the easy momentum of three years of practice. The quad was mostly empty, the late-afternoon cold keeping everyone else indoors. Not us though.
A few flakes of snow drifted toward us and melted before they landed, dissolving in the pocket of warmth Maya had created without breaking stride. She had natural healing and fire that expressed gently together as warmth, as ambient caretaking. She couldn’t throw fireballs or cauterize a wound yet. But she could keep a hypothermic patient stable, warm someone from the inside out, create a bubble of livable air in a snowstorm. It suited her perfectly.
“You look tired,” she said.
I smirked, “that’s what every woman dreams of hearing.”
She had the grace not to push it. We’d been paired as roommates freshman year because housing grouped late starters together - her fresh off a few years of finding herself, me freshly able to afford tuition. We’d bonded over being the oldest freshmen in every class and the only ones who weren’t expecting our moms to come fix our problems. We’d been inseparable since.
She was in Integrated Medical Research, same program, different specialization. Sharp and optimistic in ways I envied, with resources I tried not to resent.
“So,” she said, casual in a way that wasn’t casual at all. “Did you see the email about the volunteer positions at Children’s Memorial?”
“I saw it.”
“And?”
“And it’s unpaid.”
“It’s Dr. Tanaka’s lab. Three positions. Direct access to pediatric oncology research.” She stopped walking, which forced me to stop too. “Anna. This is the dream.”
“The dream doesn’t pay rent.”
“Neither does dying at GeneMark.” she was right. Annonyigly so.
“The deadline is Friday,” she said, softer. “Just apply.”
“I’ll think about it.”
“You always say that.”
She studied me, then let it go. She’d planted the seed. If I didn’t water it, she knew it wasn’t because I didn’t want to.
I braced for the onslaught of cold as we parted at the quad. Maya’s warm bubble headed for the library. I headed for the bus.
The apartment hit me like a wall when I opened the door. Thick and humid, the air coated my skin instantly, the radiator struggling to maintain a static climate through its broken valve. Like always, I’d left the window cracked. It hadn’t helped.
I peeled off my coat, my cardigan, changed into a tank top and shorts. Pulled my now frizzy, honey brown hair into a messy bun. Cranked the desk fan and stood in front of it, letting the air move across my skin.
This was my life. A studio that shared heating with Mr. Kowalski’s unit downstairs, which meant when he was cold (and he was always cold) my apartment became tropical. I’d mentioned it once. He’d looked at me with shrewd eyes and said the building was old, repairs were expensive, and maybe if I was unhappy I could find somewhere else.
I’d adapted.
Seven hundred and fifty dollars a month in a city where studios went for fourteen hundred. I could live with the heat.
I sat on my bed and checked my phone. A text from Maya, sent ten minutes ago:
Almost forgot. There’s a lecture tomorrow night at the Millennium Hotel. Dr. Tanaka is speaking. New approaches to targeted therapy. Free. 7 PM. Come with me.
Dr. Tanaka. Here. Tomorrow. Free.
I typed back: What time again?
7. You’re coming??
I’m coming.
LOOK AT YOU. I’M SO PROUD.
I set my phone down and stared at the water stain on the ceiling that looked like a map of somewhere better than here. Somewhere with climate control. Somewhere the dream didn’t feel so far away.
I should have gone to sleep. I had to be up in six hours. But I pulled up Dr. Tanaka’s latest paper on my laptop and started reading again, making notes, preparing questions. She was trying to solve the same problem I’d been turning over for years. How do you make treatment less terrible for kids who didn’t deserve any of this?
The radiator hissed. The fan whirred. Through the wall, another tennant’s TV blared.
I set my alarm for 5:47, thirteen minutes before I needed to wake up.
Then I turned off the light and let myself imagine what it would be like to do work that mattered. To not spend another day lying to people about their ability to light candles without a match.
The thought followed me into sleep.