'Well what?!'

The Dragon never let you finish a sentence. She deliberately interrupted you to throw you off your guard, and it worked. Kath told herself to stay calm; none of this was her fault. She risked a glance upwards and found the woman staring fiercely at her with a gaze that bored right into the back of her skull and out the other side, as if the woman could see what she was about to think, before she even thunk it. 'Thunk' isn't even a fucking word, pull yourself together! she thought. She banished the smile quickly, before the Dragon decided to make an example of her.

'It's not looking good, ma'am,' she said with a gulp. 'Omega-Five had a serious episode this morning and, well, Jez just got out of the hospital wing half an hour ago and they say he'll be alright, but this is the third time this week.' She flinched, but the Dragon just stared at her.

'Again?' she said. 'He's been to the hospital again?'

'Yes, ma'am.'

'What on earth was he doing this time?'

'Acting on a hunch I think. He's good, but not too quick to get out of the way when it all goes wrong.'

'But how is progress generally?'

'Very promising, I think we have isolated the key neurons this time, but...' Kath swallowed. She couldn't continue. They had asked so many times and were blocked at every turn.

'But what?' asked the Dragon dangerously. Kath wondered how she was going to word the question this time.

'We need the rest of the research to complete this phase,' Kath said, the words coming out in a rush. 'We need the data from the original subject to sort this out.'

The Dragon pursed her thin lips. 'You know where we stand on that issue. I have other people working on it.'

'Yes ma'am, but if we could just have access to some of the original data -'

'You will be given the access you want when it is ready. It is not ready. You cannot have access.' The woman was so infuriating, always speaking in circles and riddles. It was all 'need to know'. Well Kath needed to know, and fast. They were supposed to be saving the world, and all she met were brick walls. The Dragon tossed her tight ponytail impatiently and straightened her starched black suit. 'Come on,' she said, 'let's move.' She stormed off towards the lifts, causing the small crowd waiting there to disperse like fish before a hungry shark.

'Tell me about Omega-Five,' the Dragon said curtly. Kath's insides began to twist and churn. Oh godohgodohgod, she thought, watching the numbers slowly scrolling down to their level. Her mind coloured each one in neon swirls. The colours calmed her, but only a little. The door slid open with a quiet self-satisfied hiss.

'I'm afraid that is another problem,' she managed, stepping into the small chrome box and hitting the button for the fourth floor basement. 'We're not really sure we're on the right lines anymore - I mean I think if we - Craig says...' She trailed off, catching the look of exasperation clouding her boss's face. As usual, the words did not come out as impressively as she had planned. The Dragon looked like she was about to explode. The Techies liked to joke that one day she really would and when she did, they would discover she had hot lava for blood and a heart of stone. The usual arguments would break out about magma and stones and how her heart should really be made of diamond since pretty much everything else would melt in magma, but how could someone so utterly terrifying have anything beautiful inside her?

'Yes?'

'It's all in my report ma'am.'

'What? Oh, your report. Is it? Of course. Well I am rather busy.'

Typical, Kath thought. She didn't even bother to read it. 'After we re-organised the labs and brought the subjects all together, they started behaving pretty weird,' she said. Weird did not begin to describe it. Synchronised movements, strange trance-like silences. It had all got rather out of hand. Uncontainable, in fact. None of her neural-nets were working the way they should anymore. She pulled herself together. Something would have to give, and soon.

'That your scientific assessment, is it?'

'Fifth. Floorbase. Mentlevel.' A sing-song voice rang out and the lift doors opened.

'I think you need to see for yourself,' Kath said at last, stepping out of the tiny space with relief. The Dragon nodded once, curtly and followed. Kath turned, shaking and swallowing back a little bit of sick with a grimace. It's not your fault it's not your fault, she chanted to herself, as if the mantra would stave off the inevitable. Sharp heels click-clacked behind her with military timing. The building was a maze of bright clinical corridors, but Kath had been here long enough to know exactly where she was going, which was just as well. This bitch didn't have much tolerance for stupidity; only last week one of the security guys was fired for being too slow to recognise her. 'I'm running for Parliament and you don't know who I am?' she had shouted. 'I never open doors!'

They stopped outside a solid steel door. Kath leaned forwards and a red laser scanned her retina. 'It's not just an eye scanner. This thing can read your mind!' Craig told her on her first day in the job. She hadn't believed him, but it always seemed to make her brain tingle when the turquoise light threw fractal patterns into her eyes. A hiss. The door swung open. The two women stepped into the small chamber on the other side and waited while the air was cleansed and a Techie studied them through a thick glass window, typing visitor notes into the system. Or playing Scrabble on Facebook. You could never tell with these guys.

'What's that smell?' The Dragon said.

'I don't know... They were moving Omega-Five to a more - um - comfortable room, after his reaction last time. He has made real progress this week, ever since we brought them all together. It's quite incredible, actually. We think they-'

A Techie ran past them screaming, beautiful blue-green flames streaming off his arm.

'Where're the fucking fire extinguishers!' he shrieked, slamming shoulder-first into the nearby toilets. A loud moan of relief and the sound of fast running water making a terrible mess escaped through the closing door. Kath smiled nervously at the Dragon and rolled her eyes, but the woman looked absolutely livid.

'This way,' Kath said quickly and rushed off in the direction the burning man had come from.

Hindsight. The endless series of what if's and if only's. Who would be alive today and who would be the one to explain to the Dragon that the only evidence of how close she had actually been to an answer had just gone up in smoke.

If only the boy were here.