Free No Time to Die by Kira Peikoff Page A

professional voice.
    â€œDr. Carlyle?” she said quickly. “It’s Zoe. Zoe Kincaid.”
    â€œZoe, hello! I didn’t expect to hear from you this soon.”
    â€œYeah, listen, remember when we were talking before, how you said the goal was to control the aging genes, so I could grow up one day?”
    â€œFirst we need to figure out how they work.”
    â€œBut once you do that,” she continued, “if you can speed up my aging, won’t you also be able to slow down someone else’s?”
    â€œNot just slow it down—we’d be able to stop it altogether. If the theory proves correct, and if we can figure out how to chemically replicate your body’s way of turning off the master regulator gene, well—then aging could go the way of polio.”
    â€œThat’s a lot of ifs. What are we waiting for?”
    â€œYou.”
    â€œI’m ready. Let’s do it.”
    â€œAre you sure? You’ve had less than a day to think—”
    â€œYes,” she broke in, thinking of Gramps. “We don’t have much time.”

CHAPTER 6
    New York City
Tuesday, June 11, 10:00 A.M.
    N atalie Roy was deep in concentration when a knock on her office door startled her. She looked up from the sixteen-page report on her desk, eyes blurry from hours of cross-checking every chemical name, number, and comma. Next to its red-marked pages—the promising results of her latest experiment in her quest to extend the lives of fruit flies—was a list of prestigious journals with names like Rejuvenation Research and Molecular Genetics . If she was going to have any chance of beating out that supercilious suck-up Mitch Grover for tenure, publishing her research was key.
    Of course, the contest shouldn’t have been this close a call. Her scientific contributions were more significant than his overall. But no matter—when contemplating that elusive T word, Columbia’s world-renowned Department of Biological Sciences harbored a dirty secret—quantity trumped quality. And Mitch had more publication credits.
    Natalie shook her head, rubbing her eyes. The shortsighted faculty board would probably vote down Watson and Crick if the famous duo hadn’t published enough after discovering DNA. And not just any passion project would inspire grant money. It had to be one that aligned with a review board’s agenda.
    Everything was so goddamn political, far from the unvarnished search for truth she had envisioned as a teenage wannabe researcher twenty years ago. Of course, Mitch got all the federal funding he needed for his trendy projects, while she’d had to struggle to raise private capital after getting turned down multiple times. Her life’s mission of increasing human longevity wasn’t too appealing to a bloated government that depended—ironically—on the death of its citizens for survival.
    She blinked at her office’s bare white walls, the standard-issue wooden desk and simple black lamp, her one window overlooking the redbrick campus below. She was too busy to care about decorating her space and had only two personal items: a gardenia plant on the windowsill, and the photograph on her desk that always restored her good spirits. It was of the most beautiful child she had ever seen. Her son.
    In it, Theo, then eight, was proudly holding a soccer ball under his arm. His hair was a mop of messy brown curls, his eyes jade green. The picture was a decade old, but she kept it for his smile. His joyful exuberance at that age reminded her of the true spirit alive beneath his tense adolescent exterior. Lately he was worrying about how she, as a single mother, was going to afford his college tuition. He was planning to start community college in the fall to avoid going into debt at a fancy school, but this kind of talk crushed her. She desperately yearned—above all else—to give him the world she had raised him to believe in, a world