You Lost Us In The Test novel · Chapter 8 of 24

Chapter 8: The Tea

The label on the pink box listed five things.

Green tea. Dandelion. Ginger. Hibiscus. "Natural glow botanicals."

I didn't trust anything called a botanical.

The twins split a sachet three ways for micro. I took the rest upstairs to chemistry.

Benedict came up at seven with two cheese sandwiches and sat on a lab stool to watch.

The first thing came back at nine.

Senna. A lot of it. A laxative strong enough to make a pregnant woman cramp and bleed.

It wasn't on the label.

"That's the hospital," Benedict said quietly.

"That's one hospital."

At twenty past one in the morning, the screen showed a peak where there shouldn't have been anything.

I ran it again.

It came back in the same place.

"Sibutramine," I said.

Benedict set his sandwich down.

Sibutramine was a diet drug. Banned in Britain and America for more than fifteen years after it was tied to heart attacks and strokes.

I worked out the numbers twice on a paper towel.

"Eleven milligrams a sachet," I said. "More than a full prescription dose. And they tell you to drink three a day."

"For a wedding."

"For a wedding."

"Kenzie's been selling this to her viewers for a year," I said. "Twenty percent off. A lot of them are brides."

He took his glasses off and rubbed his eyes.

"Right," he said. "The regulator gets this first thing. Nobody else. Not head office, not the shops, not the brand. Until they've confirmed it and pulled it, this stays in this room."

"Okay."

"I mean it. If this gets out before the recall, they'll say we rigged it."

"I said okay."

He put his glasses back on and looked at me over them.

"You were very fast," he said.

He'd already turned away and was writing the sample numbers in his black capitals.

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