The centrifuge hummed like a lullaby on caffeine.
Aria stood beside the RX-317 station, gloved fingers tapping an irregular rhythm on the edge of the bench. Yusuf was bent over the console, tongue slightly out, typing with a laser focus that made his hoodie ride up at the back. Ezra sat perched on a stool, swinging one leg, holding a pipette like a conductor's baton.
"Still no documentation prior to batch 317-A," Yusuf muttered, narrowing his eyes at the database screen. "That's… weird, right?"
"You mean shady," Ezra corrected, twirling the pipette dramatically. "This whole project smells like something buried six feet under."
"Buried with clean gloves," Meilin added, walking in with a thermos in one hand and two folders in the other. "There's a paper trail — just… sliced clean before a certain date."
Aria felt it too — the gut-deep itch that something wasn't adding up.
RX-317 was a pre-clinical compound, supposedly under early-phase antiviral testing. But there were no Phase 0 notes. No animal study reports. No internal reviews. Just a greenlighted clearance notice, timestamped by L. Reed, Executive Director.
Whoever that was.
"Seriously," Ezra said, scooting over. "Has anyone even seen this 'L. A. Reed'? I asked Dr. Kapoor — she just changed the subject."
Meilin raised an eyebrow. "Could be a front. Big companies sometimes register patents under ghost names."
Aria stayed quiet, eyes flicking to the folder Meilin had placed down beside the centrifuge. It had a sticker — old and peeling — labeled "RX-317: Supplemental Archive / Offsite".
She flipped it open without thinking.
A stack of scanned pages, grainy with age. Most were chemical signatures and synth routes… until the last one.
It was a photo.
Black and white. A lab from at least a decade ago. Three people in lab coats — one woman, two men — standing beside a high-pressure reactor. The woman was laughing. One of the men had his face turned away.
But the third—
Aria's hand stilled.
He wasn't smiling, but there was something unmistakably magnetic about the man's posture. Tall, dark hair, and those eyes. Even in monochrome, they felt storm-touched. A name was faintly handwritten beneath the photo:
"Lucian A. R."
Her breath caught.
Aria turned the page back quickly, her pulse thudding.
No.
That couldn't be him.
Not her Lucian.
Her Lucian didn't work here.
He was gone.
Wasn't he?