flask from its stand and placing both softly in a cardboard box. “It’s not anything, technically. It’s a central nervous system stimulant. I borrowed the recipe from a drug that went to consumer trials a few years ago. It’s like Ritalin, but more effective, targeted, and extended-release. . . .”
Zaza was staring back, his face blank.
“How did you get here?”
“I followed you.”
“No, here here. Redemption. Everybody did some crazy thing, what did you do?”
“Oh.” He smiled, clearly proud of himself. “I created a neutral taste agent that makes milk taste like Pepsi.”
“Ew, why?”
“People hate milk, but it’s good for you. And they love Pepsi.”
“That’s the dumbest thing I’ve ever heard. But okay. Remember how you felt when you first tried it, your milk-Pepsi thing—”
“Lacto-Cola.”
“Yuck, but okay. Do you remember the breakthrough moment? Where you thought, Oh my God, I can do this, I’m going to be able to do this for my entire life, every beverage combination I ever try will be this successful because I’m just that good at it?”
“I guess.”
“Okay, it’s like that feeling, but for eight hours, about anything in the world. It’s a focus drug and a mood booster. Math kids take it to do math, basketball players take it to play basketball. Emma called it Apex because it takes you straight to your peak, and it holds you there.”
She held out a pill in front of him, and he recoiled.
“Anyway, a bunch of companies are trying to figure out a legal way to sell amphetamines as a drug to help kids who can’t focus in school, and I cracked it.”
“Amphetamines, like meth?”
She shrugged. “You say potato, I say extended-release.”
Her hands flew expertly around the cart, breaking down the last few structures and disassembling the hot plate.
“Did Emma take it?” he asked quietly.
“Yes,” Neesha said, plugging the hot plate into the wall. “Emma took it every day.”
“Who else?”
She snorted.
“What?”
“Who else?” Neesha rolled her eyes. “There are nine hundred students at Redemption. We sold two thousand pills in our first week. Who else? Everyone else. Everyone is taking it.”
“Why are you doing this?” Zaza’s voice wavered.
“What do you mean?”
“I mean, you’re basically guaranteed to get into Berkeley already, you know money’s not going to be a problem for you . . . is it really worth making all this for three thousand dollars?”
She shrugged.
“Then why? What could possibly make this worth it?”
She tried to ignore the question, but he waited for an answer. “Because,” she finally said. “With a drug this general, you need a pretty large sample size to prove its efficacy—”
“Wait—”
“—and I’m not going to get that kind of data from just feeding the drug to rats all the time, so I needed a way to prove to the judges that it can actually work, large-scale.”
“Oh my God.” Zaza looked like he was going to be sick. “You’re running human trials.”
“I mean—”
“We’re your rats.”
“I guess.”
“Just for a trophy? Is it really worth the risk, just to win?”
Yes, she wanted to scream at him, and the fact that he couldn’t understand that was exactly the reason he’d never win it. But instead she just said, “Sure.”
He was quiet for a while, as she finished with the cart. She snuck a glance at him. He’d moved farther away and set the bottles on the table. He looked like he was going to hurl.
“Is it working?” he asked, still keeping a safe distance from the silver powder. “Your trials. Are they showing results?”
She smiled and pulled a manila folder from the bottom of the cart. “See for yourself.”
She watched proudly as his eyes lit up with wonder. A half-point rise over the C-School’s test average. A spike in neural activity above the B-School’s baseline. The Robo kids had made incredible progress on their fiber-optic network; the basketball team was shaving seconds off their reaction times. “This is insane,” Zaza muttered to himself. “This is everybody. You’ve caused an uptick for the entire school. In a week.”
She smiled. “Might as well give me the trophy now.”
“Yeah,” Zaza mumbled into the folder. “Unless you go to jail first.”
Her smile disappeared. She yanked the joint of the final stand so hard that its top metal piece went flying across the room, clattering across the ground.
“Does Yangborne know about it?”
“The trials? Of course not. The drug? Kind of. He loves the idea. His only suggestion is that I should call it adderall.”
“What’s this part?” Zaza pointed to the page. “‘Overexposure,’ what does that mean?”
Neesha slowed down. “Yeah, I mean, like any trial,