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closet homosexual, although sometimes people were surprising in that way. Two riders on a motorcycle did raise that possibility, but no, this wasn’t that. She’d watched him. He was a man’s man. He appreciated women, even Asian women. Sato stared at the cowboy’s back, measuring his broad-shouldered forward stride.
    She’d underestimated him. Victory adapted form endlessly. She’d neglected that truth, relying on old tropes and easy habits
because
he was a man.
    This was a failure to be rectified.
    —
    The elevator traveled down two levels and required Sato’s thumb again before the doors let her out. They opened onto a small foyer, tiled and clinically white, with little black camera bubbles secured to the ceiling. The foyer then divided into two and Sato went left, into the women’s changing area, which was a fraction the size of the room on the other side.
    She keyed the combination for her cupboard and placed her lanyard inside. She exchanged her skirt and shirt for an approved set of thermals and pulled the pieces on, then closed the door and spun the lock.
    She pumped the dispenser on the far wall to wash her hands and face with alcohol gel. No amount of moisturizer could make up for the drying damage of the alcohol and laboratory air; that was an unfortunate cost of doing business.
    Sato left the locker room for the air curtain and the gowning room, where she pulled on one-time-use paper coveralls and swapped the slip-ons for rubber clogs followed by disposable shoe covers. Lastly, a hair cap swallowed the tight black bun and gave her head an angled alien look.
    She faced a large steel door with a small glass window, stood to its right, and rested her chin on a pad for the iris scan. All this trouble to secure the lab, to keep the research and machines disconnected from the outside world.
    All this trouble, and yet she was here.
    Lab activity was already well under way when she stepped inside, printers running, techs feeding glass tubes through droppers. On the far wall was another door that led to the animals and the operating theater.
    Mariko bowed slightly when Sato entered, a greeting between the lower lab’s only two women that had become something of a ritual. Mariko nodded toward Akio Tanaka, and rolled her eyes.
    He had ear buds in his ears, the volume up so loud that Sato could hear the music from a meter away, and he sat on a stool, hunched over a laptop with that glazed look that said he’d stayed working through the night.
    Sato giggled and Mariko smiled. They’d talk later.
    Here, sequestered away from the cameras, the listening devices, and the security men upstairs who analyzed every word and gesture, the mood was lighter and the jokes flowed freer. Sato continued on to her workstation. Dirty trays and slides awaited her, as did data sets and an hour’s worth of the mundane that had stacked up in her absence—none of it that important.
    She put a hand on Tanaka’s shoulder so he’d know she was beside him.
    He pointed to a three-inch stack of paper.
    She’d sort through his handwritten notes and correlate them for input. As the assistant to the head researcher, she was privy to every trial, every test, success and failure alike, and down here, in the bowels of the facility, as close to the research as it was possible to get, where nothing violated the theft-prevention protocols that cut the lab off from the world, there was nothing to record her movement and habits, nothing to stop her from taking what she wanted.

Munroe woke to Bradford’s rustling. The texture in the air, the fewer sounds reaching through the windows from the street, told her that he was up earlier than usual. He leaned over to kiss her, as he did every morning, but this time he stayed beside her, propped up on an elbow, tracing a finger around her belly button.
    He whispered, “Come to work with me today?”
    Munroe opened an eye and looked at him, beautiful in the shadows, muscled and half naked. They’d become