He took a breath, then decided to answer. “I did, actually.”

“Why not, it’s your baby. That’s got to be a lot of pressure, though, everybody depending on you to keep that stock price going up. No wonder the church scared you—they were going to give your drug away for free. Hard to compete with that.”

“What do you mean, competing? They have nothing to do with each other.”

She ignored the fake ignorance. “Stepladder, the Logos paper, Numinous…” She opened the backpack. “It’s all NME One-Ten.” She took out a large, white plastic bottle.

“Where did you get that?”

“Stole it from your apartment. You had boxes of them. I didn’t think you’d miss one.” She opened the bottle, shook one of the capsules into her hand, and showed it to him. It was robin’s egg blue. “I’ve had people look at them,” she said patiently. “You’re not the only guy with access to a mass-spec machine.”

He stared at the pill. “The substances are different,” he said, angry now. “In key respects. Yes, there are some molecular similarities, but years of development went into Stepladder to make it marketable.”

Ding, Ollie thought. Two points. She hadn’t been a hundred percent sure that the pills in his apartment were for the drug he’d been working on. Also, the bit about the mass spectrometer was a complete lie.

“It takes six billion dollars to bring a drug to market,” Rovil said. “Six billion on average. You know how much initial R&D costs, that first little idea? It’s a tiny slice. It’s all in testing, figuring out the right dosage—”

“Sure,” she said. “You can’t have it going off like a bomb like it did at the Little Sprout party.”

“We’ve done extensive testing,” Rovil said. “Our drug is completely safe when taken at the recommended dosages.”

Ollie liked that “we.” The ego was percolating at full strength now. For the first time since she’d known him he seemed to be fully in his body, fully alive.

“Can’t have a drug that makes everyone schizo,” she said. “Look at Lyda and Gil—completely insane.”

“Exactly.”

“But not you. I mean, not crazy in the same way,” she said. “You’re just a run-of-the-mill sociopath.”

“I’m done with this,” he said, and got to his feet.

“Sit,” she said.

“Untie me, now. This has gone on—”

“Si-i-i-it,” she said, and thumped a palm into his chest. He tipped backward into the loveseat. “Take a breath. Lyda figured it out, Rovil—you don’t have your own personal Jiminy Cricket. Where’s Ganesh? Nowhere. You’ve been faking it.” Her hand was in the pocket of her jacket, reminding him of the pistol.

“Tell me what happened in Chicago,” she said.

He shook his head. “There is no way for me to win, Ollie. In your state, anything I say will be taken as a lie. But if I try to guess what you want to hear, that will be taken as a lie as well.”

“Just talk. I’ll be the judge.”

“You’re in no condition to judge!”

“You were angry that they’d cheated you,” she said. “So you decided that no one would get the buyout money. An overdose would queer the whole deal. Kind of shortsighted of you, though. Two percent is better than nothing.”

“This is what you do,” he said. “You take fragments and guesses and unrelated details, and you make up stories. This is your mania for pattern recognition talking.”

“Sometimes when the crazy talks, you got to listen.”

“That sounds like something Lyda would say.”

“It does, doesn’t it? But here’s the thing. When there’s a real conspiracy, I am indeed hell on wheels.”

He groaned.

“You’re a bright person, Rovil. I’d rate you a three on Intelligence, maybe even a three point five.”

He blinked. “You’re trying to insult me.”

She showed him the pen. “You rated yourself a five. Really? That in itself is a sign of diminished intelligence.”

“If you let me go now,” Rovil said. “I promise not to tell anyone about this. You’re not thinking clearly, and you need help. Look around—we’re in a basement in the suburbs of Santa Fe. You’re not a secret agent anymore. You’re not NSA, or Special Forces. You’re a patient who is off her meds.”

Ollie breathed out. “So you’re not confessing then?”

“I can’t confess to something that isn’t—”

“I’ll take that as a no.”

She made her decision. Or rather, if Lyda was right, her brain decided for her. She also hoped that Lyda was right that there was no God to punish her.

From the backpack she took out a box of latex gloves and withdrew a pair.

“What are you doing?” he asked. His voice wavered—and not just for show. He was truly nervous now.

She wriggled into one glove, then the other. “Let me ask you a different question.” She picked up the bottle again. “As a professional in the pharmaceutical industry, and the product owner of Stepladder…” She shook a dozen pills into her hand. “What’s the dosage equivalent of what Lyda took in Chicago? Ten pills? Twenty? A hundred?”

His eyes widened.

“How many steps on the Stepladder?” she asked.

“You can’t do this.”

She placed an empty water bottle between her knees, then unscrewed one of the blue capsules and let the white grains drop into the bottle. “Forget the question—you’ll only lie. I need to talk to someone who has a conscience.”

He watched her as she emptied six, then ten, then fifteen capsules into the bottle. She found herself humming “Stairway to Heaven.”

“What do you want to know?” he asked.

“The name of the cowboy. All contact info, too.”

“I don’t know this cowboy. I swear.”

“See? Lying.” She unscrewed another capsule. “I figure a hundred ought to do it.”

“You’ll kill me!”

“Nah,” she said. “You may go insane, but Landon-Rousse’s own studies put the fatal dose at well over a hundred pills. Or so I read this afternoon.”

Rovil lunged forward. The water bottle was between her legs, and both her hands were occupied with the current capsule. His own hands, bound at the wrist, reached for her. She brought up her knees, but he threw himself over them and seized her throat. The chair tipped backward, and she slammed into the floor with Rovil on top of her.

She’d been expecting this move for some time; the only surprise was in how long he’d taken to try it. She made sure he’d committed to the throat; then she seized both thumbs, and twisted.

He screamed, tried to get off her. She opened her knees and circled her legs around his waist, holding him to her. He was tilted at an angle, head down, feet in the air, his thighs pressed to the lip of the chair. The ties around his ankles made it impossible for him to get leverage, and his tethered wrists made it impossible to attack her.

She twisted her hips and rolled him off the chair and onto his back. She squatted above him, still holding the good thumb. The Sig Sauer was now pressed to his forehead.

“I told you I would have to hurt you,” she said.

“Please,” Rovil said. “Don’t turn me into one of them.”

“The cowboy,” she said.

He gulped air. “I don’t know who you’re talking about.”

“Okay then,” she said. “It’s time to meet your god.”

THE PARABLE OF

the Man Who Sacrificed Himself

Once, in a city by a lake, at the top of a high tower, a rich man held a party. Unbeknownst to him, one of the guests had invited God. The deity was smuggled into the party inside a champagne bottle.

Gilbert, IT expert and the fattest guest at the party, was the first to drink. He hoisted the bottle and took two great swigs before passing it to the rich man, whose name was Edo. Edo drank a long pull, then passed it to the neuroscientist, Lyda. She sipped it once before offering it to Rovil, the former rat wrangler. Rovil only pretended to drink, pressing the mouth of the bottle to his closed lips. He quickly wiped his mouth with his sleeve and smiled broadly. He thought he felt the tingle of the psychotropic on his skin, but told himself not to worry. Such brief skin contact, he knew from helping Mikala with her experiments, should affect him only mildly. “You too,” he said to Mikala, and gave the bottle to her. She drank deeply and handed it back to him.