It was the woman, the professor, one of Ezra’s chosen six: Dr. J. Araña, the J standing pretentiously for something Ezra could not recall. She was a diminutive dark-haired chemist in her fifties—with, every now and then, a ghost of prettiness, despite a face that was now predominantly sunken eyes and puckered cheeks—who specialized in geoengineering, and who ran a notoriously private government-funded university lab. She had been a guerrilla activist in her youth, her work and protests decrying the nature of the Society, though as time went on Ezra was beginning to doubt her usefulness.
