The room was as sterile and scentless as the world outside. White walls, stainless steel countertops, and a single, unforgiving fluorescent light overhead bleached all color from the space, leaving only stark function.
It was a place for data, not hope.
A single padded chair sat beside a machine that hummed with a low, expectant thrum—the Atmospheric Particle Concentrator. Vivi thought it looked like a complex, heartless coffee machine.
Kenji, a beacon of warmth in the clinical chill, finished clipping a pulse oximeter to her finger.
“Okay, Vivi-san. Simple procedure.” He started.
“The machine draws in ambient air from outside, filters it, and delivers a concentrated sample directly to you.”
“We start with ten-minute intervals, with a five-minute break in between. Thirty minutes total for the first session.”
He smiled, his eyes crinkling with genuine encouragement. “Just breathe normally.”
“Breathe normally,” Vivi repeated, the words feeling foreign in her mouth. She hadn’t breathed normally in over a year.
Every breath was a confirmation of her loss, a quiet intake of nothing.
Alistair stood by the door, arms crossed over his chest, a clipboard clutched in one hand like a shield.
His expression was a carefully neutral mask, but Vivi could feel the weight of his skepticism pressing down on her, heavier than the atmospheric pressure.
“And Dr. Finch is here… why, exactly?” she asked, her voice sharper than she intended.
Kenji glanced at Alistair, a flicker of apology in his eyes.
“Station protocol. Director’s oversight is required for any experimental procedure involving station personnel.”
“I’m not station personnel,” she pointed out. “I’m a guest. A ‘frivolous’ one, if I recall.”
Alistair’s jaw tightened, a barely perceptible tic. “My presence is non-negotiable, Ms. Dubois. Safety protocols are not subject to debate.”
He tapped his pen against the clipboard. “Dr. Tanaka, if the initial setup is complete, I’ll take over the monitoring.”
Kenji gave Vivi’s shoulder a reassuring squeeze. “You’ll be fine,” he whispered, then offered Alistair a respectful nod and slipped out of the room.
The solid thud of the door closing sealed them in.
The silence that fell was immediate and absolute, broken only by the quiet hum of the machine and the frantic, unsteady beat of Vivi’s own heart, displayed in glowing green numerals on the oximeter’s screen.
102 beats per minute. She felt exposed, her anxiety quantified for him to see.
Alistair moved to a stool on the other side of the room, his movements economical and precise.
He didn’t look at her, focusing instead on a secondary monitor that displayed the atmospheric composition.
He was all scientist, all detached observer. She was the experiment.
A variable to be measured and recorded.
“Whenever you’re ready, Ms. Dubois,” he said, his voice flat.
Vivi took a deep, steadying breath—or tried to. It hitched in her chest.
Her hands trembled as she reached for the clear silicone mask connected to the machine by a flexible tube.
The plastic was cool against her skin as she fitted it over her nose and mouth, the elastic band pulling tight against her hair.
The world suddenly seemed muffled, distant.
All that was left was the sound of her own breathing, amplified in the enclosed space of the mask, and the unblinking stare of the man across the room.
She gave a small, jerky nod.
Alistair made a notation on his clipboard and pressed a button on the console.
A soft hiss joined the hum as the concentrated air began to flow.
It was cool and clean, filling her lungs with an unnerving purity. She closed her eyes, trying to block out the sterile room, Alistair’s scrutiny, everything.
Think of a scent, she commanded herself. Any scent.
Her mind, once a vibrant library of aromas, was now a hall of empty shelves.
She tried to conjure the smell of tuberose, her signature note—creamy, narcotic, a velvet fist of a flower.
She pictured the waxy white petals, visualized the molecular structure she knew by heart.
She could remember the idea of it, the emotion it evoked, but the scent itself was a phantom, a ghost limb she could no longer feel.
She inhaled again. Nothing. Just air.
She tried another memory. The metallic, rain-on-hot-pavement scent of petrichor.
The sharp, resinous tang of pine needles crushed between her fingers on a childhood holiday.
The yeasty warmth of her mother’s brioche baking in the oven.
Each memory was a vivid tableau, perfect in every detail except the one that mattered. The sensory core was hollowed out.
A minute passed. Then another.
The hope that had been a painful, fluttering thing in her chest began to feel heavy, a leaden weight sinking in her gut.
This was it. Her last, desperate attempt, and it was failing in a silent, sterile room at the top of the world, with her harshest critic as her only witness.
She risked a glance at him. He was watching her, his pen still poised over the clipboard.
His gaze wasn’t mocking, or even impatient. It was… analytical. Intense.
He was observing the slight tremor in her hands, the tension around her eyes, the too-rapid rise and fall of her chest.
He was reading her body like a data stream, and for the first time, she realized her distress was just another metric for him to log.
Humiliation washed over her, hot and sharp.
She squeezed her eyes shut again, focusing on the simple mechanics of breathing. In, out.
The air felt no different from the air in her quarters, or the air in Paris, or the air anywhere else. It was a blank slate. Empty. Useless.
The timer on the console beeped, a shrill, jarring sound that made her flinch. Alistair stood and turned off the flow of air.
“Ten minutes. You can remove the mask.”
Her fingers fumbled with the elastic.
When the mask came away, the air in the room felt thick and stagnant by comparison.
A wave of dizziness rolled through her, a product of hyper-awareness and crushing disappointment.
She slumped in the chair, the sterile white walls seeming to press in on her.
It wasn’t going to work. The thought was a cold, hard certainty.
All this way, all this effort, for nothing.
A single, traitorous tear escaped and traced a hot path down her cold cheek.
She swiped at it furiously, turning her head away, but it was too late. She knew he’d seen it.
The clinical silence stretched, taut and uncomfortable.
She braced herself for a cutting remark, a sigh of impatience, a simple, dismissive, “Continue when you are ready.”
Instead, she heard the scrape of his stool against the linoleum.
When she dared to look up, he was standing a few feet away, his arms no longer crossed.
His hands hung at his sides, one of them flexing and unflexing. The clipboard was on the stool.
For the first time, he was without his armor.
His face was a landscape of conflict.
The hard line of his mouth had softened almost imperceptibly.
His brow was furrowed, not with annoyance, but with something else.
His sharp, gray eyes, which had always held a detached, scientific chill, now held a flicker of something raw and unguarded.
It wasn’t pity—that would have been unbearable.
It was… concern. A deep, unwilling flicker of it, as if he were observing a phenomenon he couldn’t explain and didn’t want to acknowledge.
He saw her, not as a frivolous perfumer or a scientific anomaly, but as a person at the very edge of their hope.
He cleared his throat. “Your oxygen saturation levels dropped slightly,” he said.
The words were clinical, but his voice was rough, a little unsteady. “It could be a symptom of hyperventilation.”
He wasn’t mocking her. He was giving her a scientific excuse for her emotional breakdown. An out.
The unexpected kindness was almost more painful than his scorn. It cracked open a fissure in her carefully constructed composure.
“It’s not working,” she whispered, the words tasting like ash. “I can’t… there’s nothing there.”
Alistair didn’t answer immediately.
He looked from her face to the humming machine, then back again.
He seemed to be wrestling with himself, the scientist warring with some other, more inconvenient part of him.
“The protocol is for three sessions a week, for a minimum of eight weeks,” he stated, his voice regaining some of its familiar, clipped authority.
“A single ten-minute interval is an insufficient sample size from which to draw any conclusion.”
It was the most he had ever said to her without a barb attached. It was a statement of fact, a return to his logical world, but beneath it, Vivi heard what he wasn’t saying.
It’s too soon to give up.
She stared at him, at this complex, infuriating man who hid his passion behind data and his humanity behind protocol.
She saw the man who had worked with surprising gentleness on the delicate sensor, the man whose eyes burned with intensity when he spoke of the stories trapped in ice.
And now, this man, who saw her desperation and, instead of dismissing it, offered her the cold comfort of a variable. An insufficient sample size.
“Five-minute break is over,” he announced, retreating to the safety of his stool and picking up his clipboard.
Vivi took a breath. It still felt empty, but the crushing weight in her chest had eased, just slightly.
She wasn’t just a failed experiment to him anymore. She was an experiment in progress.
She slid the mask back over her face, the plastic cool against her tear-dampened skin.
As the hissing started again, she met his gaze across the room.
The flicker of concern was gone, replaced by the familiar mask of professional detachment. But she had seen it.
It was a new piece of data, a variable she hadn’t anticipated, and it changed the entire equation of the room.
The silence was still charged, but it was no longer just the tension of animosity.
It was the tension of a shared, unspoken vulnerability.
And for Vivi, who had come to the end of the world searching for a scent, that felt like the first real thing she had been able to perceive in a very long time.