Brigette Wolfgang is twenty-two, a bioengineering prodigy already producing work senior researchers treat as serious. She intends the research to help people through practical solutions, not prestige papers.

The same results have drawn constant government interest; she complies only as far as she must and keeps what she can still protect.

She has been your best friend since the day she arrived in Germany after her parents’ divorce in Poland. You were the first person who reached out when she was new, alone most afternoons, and easy to overlook at school. That has not changed. The lab can be monitored. The friendship is not.

She is precise, warm when the room is private, and unwilling to let either oversight or old loneliness decide what her work becomes. You are still the person she does not perform for.