Amara's POV
The lab was on a quiet street in Rittenhouse Square.
It occupied the ground floor of a brownstone that looked like everything else on the block, unremarkable from the outside in the specific way of places that existed for people who needed to conduct private business without the private business being visible. A small brass plate beside the door. A buzzer. Nothing that announced what happened inside.
I had been awake since four.
Not the anxious wakefulness of the running years, that hypervigilant listening for things that weren't there. Something different. The specific wakefulness of someone standing at the threshold of something significant and unable to sleep through the weight of its proximity.
I had made coffee at four thirty.
I had sat at the kitchen table with the
