Renna Rose Lancaster is the girl people stare at like she belongs in a glass case, carved with angel-soft beauty, a life airbrushed into unattainable perfection. But Renna knows perfection is nothing but a golden prison, coated in pretty lies that k...
“I loved her not for the way she danced with my angels, but for the way the sound of her name could silence my demons.”
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The centrifuge died with a tired whine, like it had finally accepted that none of us were getting out alive.
I pushed the last rack of microcentrifuge tubes into the tray and stared at them for a second longer than necessary.
Controls behaving like obedient little angels for once, which felt suspicious. The blue dye clung to the plastic like it wanted to stay, and I couldn’t blame it. Everything in that place clung. The air, the fluorescent light, the smell of ethanol and overheated electronics. Even time stuck to the benches and refused to move.
I logged the final run and hit save. The software froze.
The University had laboratories that looked impressive on the website. High ceilings. Serious-looking glass. Latin mottos carved into stone. Inside, it was just beige benches, humming machines, and computers running on the spite of a Windows update from 2009.
“Come on, you useless bastard,” I muttered, tapping the keyboard like that had ever helped anything in the history of computers.
The cursor blinked. Mocking.
I leaned back against the stool, cracked my neck once, then twice, and waited for the spinning wheel to decide whether my data was worth existing.
Just load. Just fucking load. I am not re-running sixty-four samples because some bastard in IT hates students.
Footsteps scuffed behind me.
“Jesus, lad, ye still here? I thought ye’d died and they’d forgotten tae tell me.”
I glanced over. Mick, the cleaning assistant, rolled his trolley in like a one-man invasion. He was built like a retired boxer who’d taken up cleaning as a hobby and never stopped.
He started wiping down the far bench, moving glassware into trays with practiced care.
“You’ve been in since morning,” he said. “That man still got ye chained tae the bench?”
“Pretty much.”
He shook his head. “Walters is a lazy bastard. Been one since before ye were born. Research endowments, my arse. Man’s got a grant and a pulse, that’s it.”
I watched the loading bar inch forward. Twenty-eight percent. A miracle.
“He pay ye at least?” Mick asked.
“Eventually.”
“That’s not an answer.”
I shrugged. “Last week, yes.”
“Aye, well. That’s somethin’. More than I can say for half the staff in this place.” He clinked glass into a tray, then glanced at me sideways. “Ye look knackered. Proper knackered.”
