The lab was dark, illuminated only by the shafts of light coming in through the glass sections of the aluminum door. Thank God the corridor lights stayed on at night. If not for them, the place would’ve been pitch black. And while the entire floor seemed to be deserted, Rito couldn’t quite work up the nerve to use the tiny flashlight in her back pocket yet.

She wasn’t sure what exactly she was afraid of – calling attention to herself, or seeing something she’d rather not see.

If ever there was a bad time for psychoanalyzing herself, this was it. Sighing, she inched forward as quietly as possible, feeling her way into the lab and trying not to knock anything over.

She could hardly even believe she’d managed to get this far. It had been easier than she’d expected. The solitary guard at the entrance had been easy enough to satisfy. He’d let her in – and even told her which way the Biochem Department was – after seeing her ID card.

Apparently, being an employee of Qayit University was enough for her to be granted access to the QRI building. It didn’t seem to matter that, as a research scholar in the Comparative Lit. Department, she could have no earthly reason to visit the Qayit Research Institute near midnight.

Well, she was here now, and all that was left for her to do was to find those goddamn drug samples and make it out of here in one piece. On her cell phone, she pulled up the photos Rinisa had sent her. Holding the phone up with one hand, she flicked on the tiny flashlight with the other and rotated on the spot, illuminating each section of the lab by turn.

Finally, her eyes landed on a row of shelves behind some instrument or apparatus she didn’t immediately recognize. On each shelf was a batch of six transparent vials, each containing a liquid of some kind.

Three of the vials on the top shelf contained gray liquid, while the substance in the other three was green. On the shelf below that, all the vials contained a honey-colored substance that seemed quite thick.

Glancing at her phone, she tried to match Rinisa’s pictures with one of the vials. But while the containers were similar, none of the substances seemed to have the right color or texture.

Dammit! They couldn’t have moved the samples already. Dileep had said just this afternoon that they were being tested in Lab 307.

Desperate, she looked around for anything that might provide a clue. She had to find those samples. She’d come too far to fail now.

Eventually, her eyes wandered over to the apparatus she’d seen when she first entered the room. It had a lot of buttons, and a lot of tubes, and looked vaguely scary. For the first time in her life, Rito regretted all those science classes she’d slept through at school.

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Hesitantly, she inched towards the machine. It wasn’t logical to feel intimidated by an inanimate object, of course, but that was precisely how she felt. Almost timidly, she reached out and ran her fingers along the large monitor, then over one of the flasks attached to the contraption by a series of wires.

As she felt her way downwards, towards the bottom of the flask, her fingers slipped. Frowning, Rito squinted at her hand, bringing it closer to her face.

There was some sort of bluish residue sticking to her skin.

Flicking the power button on her phone, she pulled up Rinisa’s pictures once again. The substance in those vials was a sort of bluish gray, the exact color as the droplet balanced on her index finger right now.

She bit her lip to keep herself from letting out a whoop of joy! This was it. The samples had to be somewhere nearby. Now, all she had to do was find them and get the hell out of here.

Forcing her trembling hands into steadiness, she ran her fingers over every section of the machine, looking for any recess or alcove that could fit a small vial. The samples had been here at some point during the day, so it seemed like the most logical place to begin her search.

After a few minutes of futile searching, she focused her efforts on the marble worktop on which the machine stood. It was hard to see in the dark, but the worktop seemed to be divided into several large sections, with a different machine or lab instrument in each one.

Narrow strips of metal separated one section from the other. And while every strip was equal in length and width, there was something off about their positioning.

Frowning, Rito bent to examine the metal strip next to the machine on which she’d found the drug residue. Carefully, she pressed down on it with two fingers and pulled.

It moved.

“Shit,” she whispered, and focused on pulling it all the way out. Under the metal strip was a dark alcove, containing a series of tiny flasks and vials.

Most of them contained the bluish-gray liquid that Rinisa claimed had been stolen from the La Fantome club.

Working as fast as she could, Rito pulled out all the vials in the alcove and pocketed the ones which contained the bluish liquid from Rinisa’s photos. Then, she carefully put the others back in their place and began sliding the metal strip back over the alcove in the worktop.

It was almost halfway in when there was a loud clang.

Rito almost bit off her own tongue in surprise, her heart thundering against her ribcage. The metal had hit some kind of an obstruction on the way in, and was now stuck, refusing to budge no matter how hard she tried to push it back into place.

“Fuck,” she muttered, pocketing her phone and the flashlight and heading for the door. She didn’t like leaving the lab in disarray; the first person who stepped through the door tomorrow would know exactly what’d happened.

But there was no more time to waste. Although the corridor had seemed deserted on her way in, the noise might’ve alerted someone in the vicinity. She didn’t have time to stick around and set things right here.

Feeling her way to the door, she reached out blindly for the doorknob. As she wrapped her fingers around it, it turned, and the door was flung open, knocking her back.

A scream stuck in her throat, Rito stared at the large, man-shaped silhouette at the doorway, framed against the well-lit corridor beyond.