I’d been shadowing Dr Croft for coming up on three months. She was a stern-faced, sour-lipped cardiologist who didn’t care to explain her every decision to a clueless student, which meant I got to spend a fair amount of time studying patients’ circulatory system holos, trying to figure out a rhyme or reason for each treatment she recommended. It was interesting, but I was pretty sure that, when I qualified as a doctor, I wasn’t going to be a cardiologist. For some reason, neuroscience drew me. Maybe it was because I needed to know why my suppression procedures had failed, whereas other people’s hadn’t. What made a human brain resistant to the effects of the hormone dams? I had no idea, but maybe one day I could study my own brain. Maybe I could help third-strike suppression candidates to ‘pass’ their final tests, like my Aunt Leah had done for me. And maybe, just maybe, I wasn’t alone in all this anymore. Maybe Scott—gorgeous, blue-eyed Scott—knew something I didn’t.