Fatal Reaction

leaned across the table and his eyes drilled into mine, “We can’t let the actions of ignorant people stop us from doing what w know is right, Kate. Not now. Not ever.”
     
    * * *
     
    Leaving Stephen to clean up the dinner things, I took my beer into the solarium, a circular room at the front of the apartment whose wide windows faced north, embracing my favorite view of the city. During the day, the room was filled with light, but at night it seemed to hang out over the dark void of the lake, the glittering splendor of the downtown skyline beckoning from a distance. I sat on the window seat, hugging my knees and nursing my beer. I felt bone tired from getting up so early and all the shocks of the day. I thought about what Stephen had said about this most recent Serezine suit and felt discouraged.
    I thought about the garden on the roof of our new building and what I knew about Paul Riskoff and I knew we were in for an ugly fight. Paul Riskoff didn’t get where he was by being a gentleman. Indeed, one of my partners who knew him well said that he wouldn’t believe Paul Riskoff if his tongue were notarized.
    But finally what I thought about, what I couldn’t stop thinking about, was what it must have been like to stand at the kitchen sink and wash Danny’s warm blood down the drain. What had it taken to close the door on his apartment, step out into the anonymous hallway, and take the elevator to the street?
    Stephen came in quietly and sat down behind me. I leaned back into his broad chest and felt his arms circle around me. In every other area of our relationship I feel as though we tread on constantly shifting ground. Fifty nights a year we stand side by side in evening dress, sip' ping champagne and displaying our good manners. By day we are lawyer and client, sorting through an increasingly difficult and complex world. It is only in his arms that I feel certain.
    It is more than that we are physically good together. That Stephen would be good with anyone, I have no doubt. He is a wonderful lover—athletic, inventive, and generous. But there is something else that draws me. It is as if through each encounter I strain to glimpse more of him. I am seduced, time and time again, by the promise of finally knowing him, of moving beyond the fireworks of physical attraction and the thread of shared history that binds us together.
    My roommate, Claudia, does not approve of my relationship with Stephen. She has been known to call him my disease and tells me I am settling for the safety of a limited relationship. When she’s really feeling pissy, she accuses me of being shallow, of being seduced by Stephen’s good looks, or she insists I’m a coward for not being willing to step into the unknown and give someone else a chance.
    All I know is that when Stephen puts his arms around me and buries his face in my hair, I cannot hear any of her warnings. He pulls me toward him, and Claudia’s arguments, the unspoken criticism of my partners, the reasoned voice of my own judgment are all drowned out by the rushing in my ears and the power of an attraction that is like a force that comes right up out of the ground.
     

CHAPTER 8
     
    I had a hard time reconciling the five-page curriculum vitae that Stephen had left on my pillow for me to read with the black-clad rebel who stood before me. My plan for the day called for me to begin with a brief tour of Lou Remminger’s lab in order to get an overview of the ZK-501 project. The trouble was that every time I looked at the world-famous chemist all I could think of was what she would look like given twenty minutes in a room with my mother and an ample supply of soap and water.
    About Dr. Remminger this much I knew already. She’d arrived at Azor unannounced the preceding April and marched into Stephen’s office. To his astonishment she set a glass vial on the desk without saying a word. In it was three grams of ZK-501—at that time it was the world’s entire supply.
    A graduate student in Remminger’s lab, fishing around for a dissertation topic, had purified it as an exercise and then spent the next several months divining its structure. When he presented his preliminary results to Remminger she immediately recognized the molecule’s potential and hastily began conducting tests in animals. The results confirmed what she’d suspected—ZK-501 dramatically reduced inflammation in tissue. That all the animals in question also died did nothing to dampen her