Darwin's Children

1

SPOTSYLVANIA COUNTY, VIRGINIA

Morning lay dark and quiet around the house. Mitch Rafelson stood with coffee cup in hand on the back porch, dopey from just three hours of sleep. Stars still pierced the sky. A few persistent moths and bugs buzzed around the porch light. Raccoons had been at the garbage can in back, but had left, whickering and scuffling, hours ago, discouraged by lengths of chain.

The world felt empty and new.

Mitch put his cup in the kitchen sink and returned to the bedroom. Kaye lay in bed, still asleep. He adjusted his tie in the mirror above the dresser. Ties never looked right on him. He grimaced at the way his suit hung on his wide shoulders, the gap around the collar of his white shirt, the length of sleeve visible beyond the cuff of his coat.

There had been a row the night before. Mitch and Kaye and Stella, their daughter, had sat up until two in the morning in the small bedroom trying to talk it through. Stella was feeling isolated. She wanted, needed to be with young people like her. It was a reasonable position, but they had no choice.

Not the first time, and likely not the last. Kaye always approached these events with studied calm, in contrast to Mitch’s evasion and excuses. Of course they were excuses. He had no answers to Stella’s questions, no real response to her arguments. They both knew she ultimately needed to be with her own kind, to find her own way.

Finally, too much, Stella had stomped off and slammed the door to her room. Kaye had started crying. Mitch had held her in bed and she had gradually slipped into twitching sleep, leaving him staring at the darkened ceiling, tracking the play of lights from a truck grumbling down the country road outside, wondering, as always, if the truck would come up their drive, come for their daughter, come to claim bounty or worse.

He hated the way he looked in what Kaye called his Mr. Smith duds—as in Mr. Smith Goes to Washington. He lifted one hand and rotated it, studying the palm, the long, strong fingers, wedding ring—though he and Kaye had never gotten a license. It was the hand of a hick.

He hated to drive into the capital, through all the checkpoints, using his congressional appointment pass. Slowly moving past all the army trucks full of soldiers, deployed to stop yet another desperate parent from setting off another suicide bomb. There had been three such blasts since spring.

And now, Riverside, California.

Mitch walked to the left side of the bed. “Good morning, love,” he whispered. He stood for a moment, watching his woman, his wife. His eyes moved along the sleeve of her pajama top, absorbing every wrinkle in the rayon, every silken play of pre-dawn light, down to slim hands, curled fingers, nails bitten to the quick.

He bent to kiss her cheek and pulled the covers over her arm. Her eyes fluttered open. She brushed the back of his head with her fingers. “G’luck,” she said.

“Back by four,” he said.

“Love you.” Kaye pushed into the pillow with a sigh.

Next stop was Stella’s room. He never left the house without making the rounds, filling his eyes and memory with pictures of wife and daughter and house, as if, should they all be taken away, should this be the last time, he could replay the moment. Fat good it would do.

Stella’s room was a neat jumble of preoccupations and busyness in lieu of having friends. She had pinned a farewell photo of their disreputable orange tabby on the wall over her bed. Tiny stuffed animals spilled from her cedar chest, beady eyes mysterious in the shadows. Old paperback books filled a small case made of pine boards that Mitch and Stella had hammered together last winter. Stella enjoyed working with her father, but Mitch had noticed the distance growing between them for a couple of years now.

Stella lay on her back in a bed that had been too short for over a year. At eleven, she was almost as tall as Kaye and beautiful in her slender, round-faced way, skin pale copper and tawny gold in the glow of the night-light, hair dark brown with reddish tints, same texture as Kaye’s and not much longer.

Their family had become a triangle, still strong, but with the three sides stretching each month. Neither Mitch nor Kaye could give Stella what she really needed.

And each other?

He looked up to see the orange line of sunrise through the filmy white curtains of Stella’s window. Last night, cheeks freckling with anger, Stella had demanded to know when they would let her out of the house on her own, without makeup, to be with kids her own age. Her kind of kids. It had been two years since her last “play date.”

Kaye had done wonders with home teaching, but as Stella had pointed out last night, over and over again, with rising emotion, “I am not like you!” For the first time, Stella had formally proclaimed: “I am not human!”

But of course she was. Only fools thought otherwise. Fools, and monsters, and their daughter.

Mitch kissed Stella on the forehead. Her skin was warm. She did not wake up. Stella as she slept smelled like her dreams, and now she smelled the way tears taste, tang of salt and sadness.

“Got to go,” he murmured. Stella’s cheeks produced waves of golden freckles. Mitch smiled.

Even asleep, his daughter could say good-bye.

2

Center for Ancient Viral Studies, United States Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases: USAMRIID

FORT DETRICK, MARYLAND

“People died, Christopher,” Marian Freedman said. “Isn’t that enough to make us cautious, even a little crazy?”

Christopher Dicken walked beside her, tilting on his game leg, staring down the concrete corridor to the steel door at the end. His National Cancer Institute ID badge still poked from his jacket pocket. He clutched a large bouquet of roses and lilies. The two had been engaged in debate from the front desk through four security checkpoints.

“Nobody’s diagnosed a case of Shiver for a decade,” he said. “And nobody ever got sick from the children. Isolating them is politics, not biology.”

Marian took his day pass and ran it through the scanner. The steel door opened to a horizontal spread of sunglass-green access tubes, suspended like a hamster maze over a two-acre basin of raw gray concrete. She held out her hand, letting him go first. “You know about Shiver firsthand.”

“It went away in a couple of weeks,” Dicken said.

“It lasted five weeks, and it damned near killed you. Don’t bullshit me with your virus hunter bravado.”

Dicken stepped slowly onto the catwalk, having difficulty judging depth with just one eye, and that covered by a thick lens. “The man beat his wife, Marian. She was sick with a tough pregnancy. Stress and pain.”

“Right,” Marian said. “Well, that certainly wasn’t true with Mrs. Rhine, was it?”

“Different problem,” Dicken admitted.

Freedman smiled with little humor. She sometimes revealed biting wit, but did not seem to understand the concept of humor. Duty, hard work, discovery, and dignity filled the tight circle of her life. Marian Freedman was a devout feminist and had never married, and she was one of the best and most dedicated scientists Dicken had ever met.

Together, they marched north on the aluminum catwalk. She adjusted her pace to match his. Tall steel cylinders waited at the ends of the access tubes, shaft housings for elevators to the chambers beneath the seamless concrete slab. The cylinders wore big square “hats,” high-temperature gas-fired ovens that would sterilize any air escaping from the facilities below.

“Welcome to the house that Augustine built. How is Mark, anyway?”

“Not happy, last time I saw him,” Dicken said.

“Why am I not surprised? Of course, I should be charitable. Mark moved me up from studying chimps to studying Mrs. Rhine.”

Twelve years before, Freedman had headed a primate lab in Baltimore, during the early days when the Centers for Disease Control had launched the task force investigating Herod’s plague. Mark Augustine, then director of the CDC and Dicken’s boss, had hoped to secure extra funding from Congress during a fiscal dry spell. Herod’s, thought to have caused thousands of hideously malformed miscarriages, had seemed like a terrific goad.

Herod’s had quickly been traced to the transfer of one of thousands of Human Endogenous Retroviruses—HERV—carried by all people within their DNA. The ancient virus, newly liberated, mutated and infectious, had been promptly renamed SHEVA, for Scattered Human Endogenous Viral Activation.

In those days, viruses had been assumed to be nothing more than selfish agents of disease.

“She’s been looking forward to seeing you,” Freedman said. “How long since your last visit?”

“Six months,” Dicken said.

“My favorite pilgrim, paying his respects to our viral Lourdes,” Freedman said. “Well, she’s a wonder, all right. And something of a saint, poor dear.”

Freedman and Dicken passed junctions with tubes branching southwest, northeast, and northwest to other shafts. Outside, the summer morning was warming rapidly. The sun hung just above the horizon, a subdued greenish ball. Cool air pulsed around them with a breathy moan.

They came to the end of the main tube. An engraved Formica placard to the right of the elevator door read, “MRS. CARLA RHINE.” Freedman punched the single white button. Dicken’s ears popped as the door closed behind them.

SHEVA had turned out to be much more than a disease. Shed only by males in committed relationships, the activated retrovirus served as a genetic messenger, ferrying complicated instructions for a new kind of birth. SHEVA infected recently fertilized human eggs—in a sense, hijacked them. The Herod’s miscarriages were first-stage embryos, called “interim daughters,” not much more than specialized ovaries devoted to producing a new set of precisely mutated zygotes.

Without additional sexual activity, the second-stage zygotes implanted and covered themselves with a thin, protective membrane. They survived the abortion of the first embryo and started a new pregnancy.

To some, this had looked like a kind of virgin birth.

Most of the second-stage embryos had gone to term. Worldwide, in two waves separated by four years, three million new children had been born. More than two and a half million of the infants had survived. There was still controversy over exactly who and what they were—a diseased mutation, a subspecies, or a completely new species.

Most simply called them virus children.

“Carla’s still cranking them out,” Freedman said as the elevator reached the bottom. “She’s shed seven hundred new viruses in the last four months. About a third are infectious, negative-strand RNA viruses, potentially real bastards. Fifty-two of them kill pigs within hours. Ninety-one are almost certainly lethal to humans. Another ten can probably kill both pigs and humans.” Freedman glanced over her shoulder to see his reaction.

“I know,” Dicken said dryly. He rubbed his hip. His leg bothered him when he stood for more than fifteen minutes. The same White House explosion that had taken his eye, twelve years ago, had left him partially disabled. Three rounds of surgery had allowed him to put aside the crutches but not the pain.

“Still in the loop, even at NCI?” Freedman asked.

“Trying to be,” he said.

“Thank God there are only four like her.”

“She’s our fault,” he said, and paused to reach down and massage his calf.

“Maybe, but Mother Nature’s still a bitch,” Freedman said, watching him with her hands on her hips.

A small airlock at the end of the concrete corridor cycled them through to the main floor. They were now fifty feet below ground. A guard in a crisp green uniform inspected their passes and permission papers and compared them with the duty and guest roster at her workstation.

“Please identify,” she told them. Both placed their eyes in front of scanners and simultaneously pressed their thumbs onto sensitive plates. A female orderly in hospital greens escorted them to the cleanup area.

Mrs. Rhine was housed in one of ten underground residences, four of them currently occupied. The residences formed the center of the most redundantly secure research facility on Earth. Though Dicken and Freedman would never come any closer than seeing her through a four-inch-thick acrylic window, they would have to go through a whole-body scrub before and after the interview. Before entering the viewing area and staging lab, called the inner station, they would put on special hooded undergarments impregnated with slow-release antivirals, zip up in plastic isolation suits, and attach themselves to positive pressure umbilical hoses.

Mrs. Rhine and her companions at the center never saw real human beings unless they were dressed to resemble Macy’s parade balloons.

On leaving, they would stand under a disinfectant shower, then strip down and shower again, scrubbing every orifice. The suits would be soaked and sterilized overnight, and the undergarments would be incinerated.

The four women interned at the facility ate well and exercised regularly. Their quarters—each roughly the size of a two-bedroom apartment—were maintained by automated servants. They had their hobbies—Mrs. Rhine was a great one for hobbies—and access to a wide selection of books, magazines, TV shows, and movies.

Of course, the women were becoming more and more eccentric.

“Any tumors?” Dicken asked.

“Official question?” Freedman asked.

“Personal,” Dicken said.

“No,” Freedman said. “But it’s only a matter of time.”

Dicken handed the flowers to the orderly. “Don’t boil them,” he said.

“I’ll process them myself,” the orderly promised with a smile. “She’ll get them before you’re done here.” She passed them two sealed white paper bags containing their undergarments and showed them the way to the scrub stalls, then to the tall cabinets that held the isolation suits, as glossy and green as dill pickles.

Christopher Dicken was legendary even at Fort Detrick. He had tracked Mrs. Rhine to a motel in Bend, Oregon, where she had fled after the death of her husband and daughter. He had talked her into opening the door to the small, spare room, and had spent twenty minutes with her, unprotected, while Emergency Action vans gathered in the parking lot.

He had done all this, despite having already contracted Shiver from a woman in Mexico the year before. That woman, a plump female in her forties, seven months pregnant, had been severely beaten by her husband. A small, stupid, jackal-like man with a long criminal record, he had kept her alone and without medical help in a small room at the back of a shabby apartment for three months. Her baby had been born dead.

Something in the woman had produced a defensive viral response, enhanced by SHEVA, and her husband had suffered the consequences. In his darkest early morning vigils of pacing, tending phantom twitches and pains in his leg, alone and wide awake, Dicken had often thought of the husband’s death as natural justice, and his own exposure and subsequent illness as accidental blow-by—an occupational hazard.

Mrs. Rhine’s case was different. Her problems had been caused by an interplay of human and natural forces no one could have possibly predicted.

In the late nineties, she had suffered from end-stage renal disease and had been the recipient of an experimental xenotransplant—a pig kidney. The transplant had worked. Three years later, Mrs. Rhine had contracted SHEVA from her husband. This had stimulated an enthusiastic release of PERV—Porcine Endogenous Retrovirus—from the pig cells. Before Mrs. Rhine had been diagnosed and isolated at Fort Detrick, her pig and human retroviruses had shuffled genes—recombined—with latent herpes simplex virus and had begun to express, with diabolical creativity, a Pandora’s box of long-dormant diseases, and many new ones.

Ancient viral tool kits, Mark Augustine had called them, with true prescience.

Mrs. Rhine’s husband, newborn daughter, and seven relatives and friends had been infected by the first of her recombined viruses. They had all died within hours.

Of forty-one individuals who had received pig tissue transplants in the United States, and had subsequently been exposed to SHEVA, the women at the center were the only survivors. Perversely, they were immune to the viruses they produced. Isolated as they were, the four women never caught colds or flu. That made them extraordinary subjects for research—deadly but invaluable.

Mrs. Rhine was a virus hunter’s dream, and whenever Dicken did dream about her, he awoke in a cold sweat.

He had never told anyone that his approach to Mrs. Rhine in that motel room in Bend had had less to do with courage than with a reckless indifference. Back then, he simply had not cared whether he lived or died. His entire world had been turned upside down, and everything he thought he knew had been subjected to a harsh and unmerciful glare.

Mrs. Rhine was special to him because they had both been through hell.

“Suit up,” Freedman said. They took off their clothes in separate stalls and hung them in lockers. Small video screens mounted beside the multiple shower heads in each stall reminded them where and how to scrub.

Freedman helped Dicken pull his undergarment over his stiff leg. Together, they tugged on thick plastic gloves, then slipped their hands into the mitts of the pickle-green suits. This left them with all the manual dexterity of fur seals. Fingerless suits were tougher, more secure, and cheaper, and nobody expected visitors to the inner station to do delicate lab work. Small plastic hooks on the thumb side of each glove allowed them to pull up the other’s rear zipper, then strip away a plastic cover on the inner side of a sticky seam. A special pinching tool pressed the seam over the zipper.

This took twenty minutes.

They walked through a second set of showers, then through another airlock. Confined within the almost airless hood, Dicken felt perspiration bead his face and slide down his underarms. Beyond the second airlock, each hooked the other to their umbilicals—the familiar plastic hoses suspended on clanking steel hooks from an overhead track.

Their suits plumped with pressure. The flow of fresh cool air revived him.

The last time, at the end of his visit, Dicken had emerged from his suit with a nosebleed. Freedman had saved him from weeks of quarantine by diagnosing and stanching the bleeding herself.

“You’re good for the inner,” the orderly told them through a bulkhead speaker.

The last hatch slid open with a silky whisper. Dicken walked ahead of Freedman into the inner station. In sync, they turned to the right and waited for the steel window blinds to ratchet up.

The few incidents of Shiver had started at least a hundred crash courses in medical and weapons-related research. If abused women, and women given xenotransplants, could all by themselves design and express thousands of killer plagues, what could a generation of virus children do?

Dicken clenched his jaw, wondering how much Carla Rhine had changed in sixth months.

Something of a saint, poor dear.

3

Office of Special Reconnaissance

LEESBURG, VIRGINIA

Mark Augustine walked with a cane down a long underground tunnel, following a muscular red-headed woman in her late thirties. Big steam pipes lined the tunnel on both sides and the air in the tunnel was warm. Conduits of fiber optic cables and wires were bundled and cradled in long steel trays slung from the concrete ceiling, and away from the pipes.

The woman wore a dark green silk suit with a red scarf and running shoes, gray with outdoor use. Augustine’s hard-soled Oxfords scuffed and tapped as he trailed several steps behind, sweating. The woman showed no consideration for his slower pace.

“Why am I here, Rachel?” he asked. “I’m tired. I’ve been traveling. There’s work to do.”

“Something’s developing, Mark. I’m sure you’ll love it,” Browning called back over her shoulder. “We’ve finally located a long-lost colleague.”

“Who?”

“Kaye Lang,” Browning replied.

Augustine grimaced. He sometimes pictured himself as a toothless old tiger in a government filled with vipers. He was perilously close to becoming a figurehead, or worse, a clown over a drop tank. His only remaining survival tactic was a passive appearance of being outpaced by young and vicious career bureaucrats attracted to Washington by the smell of incipient tyranny.

The cane helped. He had broken his leg in a fall in the shower last year. If they thought he was weak and stupid, that gave him an advantage.

The maximum depth of Washington’s soulless vacancy was the proud personal record of Rachel Browning. A specialist in law enforcement data management, married to a telecom executive in Connecticut whom she rarely saw, Browning had begun as Augustine’s assistant in EMAC—Emergency Action—seven years ago, had moved into foreign corporate interdiction at the National Security Agency and had finally jumped aisle again to head the intelligence and enforcement branch of EMAC. She had started the Special Reconnaissance Office—SRO—which specialized in tracking dissidents and subversives and infiltrating radical parent groups. SRO shared its satellites and other equipment with the National Reconnaissance Office.

Once upon a time, in a different lifetime, Browning had been very useful to him.

“Kaye Lang Rafelson is not someone you just lure and bust,” Augustine said. “Her daughter is not just another notch on the handle of our butterfly net. We have to be very careful with all of them.”

Browning rolled her eyes. “She’s not off limits according to any directive I’ve received. I certainly do not regard her as a sacred cow. It’s been seven years since she was on Oprah.”

“If you ever feel the need to learn political science, much less public relations, I know of some excellent undergraduate courses at City College,” Augustine said.

Browning smiled her patent leather smile once again, bulletproof, certainly proof against a toothless tiger.

They arrived at the elevator together. The door opened. A Marine with a holstered nine millimeter greeted them with hard gray eyes.

Two minutes later, they stood in a small private office. Four plasma displays like a Japanese screen rose on steel stands beyond the central desk. The walls were bare and beige, insulated with close-packed, sound-absorbing foam panels.

Augustine hated enclosed spaces. He had come to hate everything he had accomplished in the last eleven years. His entire life was an enclosed space.

Browning took the only seat and laid her hands over a keyboard and trackball. Her fingers danced over the keyboard, and she palmed the trackball, sucking on her teeth as she watched the monitor. “They’re living about a hundred miles south of here,” she murmured, focusing on her task.

“I know,” Augustine said. “Spotsylvania County.”

She looked up, startled, then cocked her head to one side. “How long have you known?”

“A year and a half,” Augustine said.

“Why not just take them? Soft heart, or soft brain?”

Augustine dismissed that with a blink revealing neither opinion nor passion. He felt his face tighten. Soon his cheeks would begin to hurt like hell, a residual effect from the blast in the basement of the White House, the bomb that had killed the president, nearly killed Augustine, and taken the eye of Christopher Dicken. “I don’t see anything.”

“The network is still assembling,” Browning said. “Takes a few minutes. Little Bird is talking to Deep Eye.”

“Lovely toys,” he commented.

“They were your idea.”

“I’ve just come back from Riverside, Rachel.”

“Oh. How was it?”

“Awful beyond belief.”

“No doubt.” Browning removed a Kleenex from her small black purse and delicately blew her nose, one nostril at a time. “You sound like someone who wants to be relieved of command.”

“You’ll be the first to know, I’m sure,” Augustine said.

Rachel pointed to the monitor, snapped her fingers, and like magic, a picture formed. “Deep Eye,” she said, and they looked down upon a small patch of Virginia countryside flocked with thick green trees and pierced by a winding, two-lane road. Deep Eye’s lens zoomed in to show the roof of a house, a driveway with a single small truck, a large backyard surrounded by tall oaks.

“And… here’s Little Bird,” Browning’s voice turned husky with an almost erotic approval.

The view switched to that of a drone swooping up beside the house like a dragonfly. It hovered near a small frame window, then adjusted exposure in the morning brightness to reveal the head and shoulders of a young girl, rubbing her face with a washcloth.

“Recognize her?” Browning asked.

“The last picture we have is from four years ago,” Augustine said.

“That must be from an inexcusable lack of trying.”

“You’re right,” Augustine admitted.

The girl left the bathroom and vanished from view. Little Bird rose to hover at an altitude of fifty feet and waited for instructions from the unseen pilot, probably in the back of a remoter truck a few miles from the house.

“I think that’s Stella Nova Rafelson,” Browning mused, tapping her lower lip with a long red fingernail.

“Congratulations. You’re a voyeur,” Augustine said.

“I prefer ‘paparazzo.’”

The view on the screen veered and dropped to take in a slender female figure stepping off the front porch and onto the scattered gravel walkway. She was carrying something small and square in one hand.

“Definitely our girl,” Browning said. “Tall for her age, isn’t she?”

Stella walked with rigid determination toward the gate in the wire fence. Little Eye dropped and magnified to a three-quarter view. The resolution was remarkable. The girl paused at the gate, swung it halfway open, then glanced over her shoulder with a frown and a flash of freckles.

Dark freckles, Augustine thought. She’s nervous.

“What is she up to?” Browning asked. “Looks like she’s going for a walk. And not to school, I’m thinking.”

Augustine watched the girl amble along the dirt path beside the old asphalt road, out in the country, as if taking a morning stroll.

“Things are moving kind of fast,” Browning said. “We don’t have anyone on site. I don’t want to lose the opportunity, so I’ve alerted a stringer.”

“You mean a bounty hunter. That’s not wise.”

Browning did not react.

“I do not want this, Rachel,” Augustine said. “It’s the wrong time for this kind of publicity, and certainly for these tactics.”

“It’s not your choice, Mark,” Browning said. “I’ve been told to bring her in, and her parents as well.”

“By whom?” Augustine knew that his authority had been sliding of late, perhaps drastically since Riverside. But he had never imagined that Riverside would lead to an even more severe crackdown.

“It’s a sort of test,” Browning said.

The secretary of Health and Human Services shared authority over EMAC with the president. Forces within EMAC wanted to change that and remove HHS from the loop entirely, consolidating their power. Augustine had tried the same thing himself, years ago, in a different job.

Browning took control from the remoter truck and sent Little Bird down the road, buzzing quietly a discreet distance behind Stella Nova Rafelson. “Don’t you think Kaye Lang should have kept her maiden name when she married?”

“They never married,” Augustine said.

“Well, well. The little bastard.”

“Fuck you, Rachel,” Augustine said.

Browning looked up. Her face hardened. “And fuck you, Mark, for making me do your job.”

4

MARYLAND

Mrs. Rhine stood in her living room, peering through the thick acrylic pane as if searching for the ghosts of another life. In her late thirties, she was of medium height, with stocky arms and legs but a thin torso, chin strong and pointed. She wore a bright yellow dress and a white blouse with a patchwork vest she had made herself. What they could see of her face between gauze bandages was red and puffy, and her left eye had swollen shut.

Her arms and legs were completely covered in Ace bandages. Mrs. Rhine’s body was trying to eliminate trillions of new viruses that could craftily claim they were part of her self, from her genome; but the viruses were not making her sick. Her own immune response was the principle cause of her torment.

Someone, Dicken could not remember who, had likened autoimmune disease to having one’s body run by House Republicans. A few years in Washington had eerily reinforced the aptness of this comparison.

“Christopher?” Mrs. Rhine called out hoarsely.

The lights in the inner station switched on with a click.

“It’s me,” Dicken answered, his voice sibilant within the hood.

Mrs. Rhine decorously sidestepped and curtsied, her dress swishing. Dicken saw that she had placed his flowers in a large blue vase, the same vase she had used the last time. “They’re beautiful,” she said. “White roses. My favorites. They still have some scent. Are you well?”

“I am. And you?”

“Itching is my life, Christopher,” she said. “I’m reading Jane Eyre. I think, when they come here to make the movie, down here deep in the Earth, as they will, don’t you know, that I will play Mr. Rochester’s first wife, poor thing.” Despite the swelling and the bandages, Mrs. Rhine’s smile was dazzling. “Would you call it typecasting?”

“You’re more the mousy, inherently lovely type who saves the rugged, half-crazed male from his darker self. You’re Jane.”

She pulled up a folding chair and sat. Her living room was normal enough, with a normal decor—couches, chairs, pictures on the walls, but no carpeting. Mrs. Rhine was allowed to make her own throw rugs. She also knitted and worked on a loom in another room, away from the windows. She was said to have woven a fairy-tale tapestry involving her husband and infant daughter, but she had never shown it to anyone.

“How long can you stay?” Mrs. Rhine asked.

“As long as you’ll put up with me,” Dicken said.

“About an hour,” Marian Freedman said.

“They gave me some very nice tea,” Mrs. Rhine said, her voice losing strength as she looked down at the floor. “It seems to help with my skin. Pity you can’t share it with me.”

“Did you get my package of DVDs?” Dicken asked.

“I did. I loved Suddenly, Last Summer,” Mrs. Rhine said, voice rising again. “Katharine Hepburn plays mad so well.”

Freedman gave him a dirty look through their hoods. “Are we on a theme here?”

“Hush, Marian,” Mrs. Rhine said. “I’m fine.”

“I know you are, Carla. You’re more sane than I am.”

“That is certainly true,” Mrs. Rhine said. “But then I don’t have to worry about me, do I? Honestly, Marian’s been good to me. I wish I had known her before. Actually, I wish she’d let me fix her hair.”

Freedman lifted an eyebrow, leaning in toward the window so Mrs. Rhine could see her expression. “Ha, ha,” she said.

“They really aren’t treating me too badly, and I’m passing all my psychological profiles.” Mrs. Rhine’s face dropped some of the overwrought, elfin look it assumed when she engaged in this kind of banter. “Enough about me. How are the children doing, Christopher?”

Dicken detected the slightest hitch in her voice.

“They’re doing okay,” Dicken said.

Her tone became brittle. “The ones who would have gone to school with my daughter, had she lived. Are they still kept in camps?”

“Mostly. Some are hiding out.”

“What about Kaye Lang?” Mrs. Rhine asked. “I’m especially interested in her and her daughter. I read about them in the magazines. I saw her on the Katie Janeway show. Is she still raising her daughter without the government’s help?”

“As far as I know,” Dicken said. “We haven’t kept in touch. She’s kind of gone underground.”

“You were good friends, I read in the magazines.”

“We were.”

“You shouldn’t lose touch with your friends,” Mrs. Rhine said.

“I agree,” Dicken said. Freedman listened patiently. She understood Mrs. Rhine with more than clinical thoroughness, and she also understood the two feminine poles of Christopher Dicken’s busy but lonely life: Mrs. Rhine, and Kaye Lang, who had first pinpointed and predicted the emergence of SHEVA. Both had touched him deeply.

“Any news on what they’re doing inside me, all those viruses?”

“We have a lot to learn,” Dicken said.

“You said some of the viruses carry messages. Are they whispering inside me? My pig viruses… are they still carrying pig messages?”

“I don’t know, Carla.”

Mrs. Rhine held out her dress and dropped down in her overstuffed chair, then brushed back her hair with one hand. “Please, Christopher. I killed my family. Understanding what happened is the one thing I need in this life. Tell me, even the little stuff, your guesses, your dreams… anything.”

Freedman nodded. “Good or bad, we tell her all we know,” she said. “It’s the least she deserves.”

In a halting voice, Dicken began to outline what had been learned since his last visit. The science was sharper, progress had been made. He left out the weapons research aspect and focused on the new children.

They were remarkable and in their own way, remarkably beautiful. And that made them a special problem to those they had been designed to replace.

5

SPOTSYLVANIA, VIRGINIA

“I hear you smell as good as a dog,” the young man in the patched denim jacket said to a tall, slender girl with speckled cheeks. He reverently set a six-pack of Millers on the Formica countertop and slapped down a twenty-dollar bill. “Luckies,” he told the minimart clerk.

“She doesn’t smell good as a dog,” the second male said with a dull smile. “She smells worse.”

“You guys cut it out,” the clerk warned, putting away the bill and getting his cigarettes. She was rail thin with pale skin and tormented blonde hair. A haze of stale cigarettes hung around her coffee-spotted uniform.

“We’re just talking,” the first male said. He wore his hair in a short ponytail tied with a red rubber band. His companion was younger, taller and stooped, long brown hair topped by a baseball cap.

“I’m warning you, no trouble!” the clerk said, her voice as rough as an old road. “Honey, you ignore him, he’s just fooling.”

Stella pocketed her change and picked up her bottle of Gatorade. She was wearing shorts and a blue tank top and tennis shoes and no makeup. She gave the two men a silent sniff. Her nostrils dimpled. They were in their mid-twenties, paunchy, with fleshy faces and rough hands. Their jeans were stained by fresh paint and they smelled sour and gamy, like unhappy puppies.

They weren’t making much money and they weren’t very smart. More desperate than some, and quick to suspicion and anger.

“She doesn’t look infeckshus,” the second male said.

“I mean it, guys, she’s just a little girl,” the clerk insisted, her face going blotchy.

“What’s your name?” Stella asked the first male.

“I don’t care you should know,” he said, then looked to his friend with a cocky smile.

“Leave her be,” the clerk warned one more time, worn down. “Honey, you just go home.”

The stooped male grabbed his six-pack by its plastic sling and started for the door. “Let’s go, Dave.”

Dave was working himself up. “She doesn’t fucking belong here,” he said, wrinkling his face. “Why in shit should we put up with this?”

“You stop that language!” the clerk cried. “We get kids in here.”

Stella drew herself up to a lanky five feet nine inches and extended her long-fingered hand. “Pleased to meet you, David. I’m Stella,” she said.

Dave stared at her hand in disgust. “I wouldn’t touch you for ten million dollars. Why ain’t you in a camp?”

“Dave!” the stooped fellow snapped.

Stella felt the fever scent rise. Her ears tingled. It was cool inside the minimart and hot outside, hot and humid. She had been walking in the sun for half an hour before she had found the Texaco and pushed through the swinging glass doors to buy a drink. She wasn’t wearing makeup. The others could see clearly whatever the dapples on her cheeks were doing. So be it. She stood her ground by the counter. She did not want to yield to Dave, and the clerk’s halfhearted defense rankled.

Dave picked up his Luckies. Stella liked the smell of tobacco before it was lit but hated the burning stink. She knew that worried men smoked, unhappy men, nervous and under stress. Their knuckles were square and their hands looked like mummy hands from sun and work and tobacco. Stella could learn a lot about people just by a sniff and a glance. “Our little radar,” Kaye called her.

“It’s nice in here,” Stella said, her voice small. She held a small book in front of her as if for protection. “It’s cool.”

“You are something, you know it?” Dave said with a touch of admiration. “An ugly little turd, but brave as a skunk.”

Dave’s friend stood by the glass doors. The sweat on the man’s hand reacted with the steel of the handle and reeked like a steel spoon dipped in vanilla ice cream. Stella could not eat ice cream with a steel spoon because the odor, like fear and madness, made her ill. She used a plastic spoon instead.

“Fuck it, Dave, let’s go! They’ll come get her and maybe they’ll take us, too, if we get too close.”

“My people aren’t really infeckshus,” Stella said. She stepped toward the man by the counter, long neck craned, head poking forward. “But you never know, Dave.”

The clerk sucked in her breath.

Stella had not meant to say that. She had not known she was so mad. She backed off a few inches, wanting to apologize and explain herself, say two things at once, speaking on both sides of her tongue, to make them hear and feel what she meant, but they would not understand; the words, doubled so, would jumble in their heads and only make them angrier.

What came out of Stella’s mouth in a soothing alto murmur, her eyes focused on Dave’s, was, “Don’t worry. It’s safe. If you want to beat me up, my blood won’t hurt you. I could be your own little Jesus.”

The fever-scent did its thing. The glands behind her ears began to pump defensive pheromones. Her neck felt hot.

“Shit,” the clerk said, and bumped up against the tall rack of cigarettes behind her.

Dave showed the whites of his eyes like a skittish horse. He veered toward the door, giving her a wide berth, the deliberate smell of her in his nose. She had snuffed the fuse of his anger.

Dave joined his friend. “She smells like fucking chocolate,” he said, and they kicked the glass doors open with their boots.

An old woman at the back of the store, surrounded by aisles jammed with puffed bags of potato chips, stared at Stella. Her hand shook a can of Pringles like a castanet. “Go away!”

The clerk moved in to defend the old woman. “Take your Gatorade and go home!” she barked at Stella. “Go home to your mama and don’t you never come back here.”

6

The Longworth House Office Building

WASHINGTON, D.C.

“We’ve been over and over this,” Dick Gianelli told Mitch, dropping a stack of scientific reprints on the coffee table between them. The news was not good.

Gianelli was short and round and his usually pale face was now a dangerous red. “We’ve been reading everything you sent us ever since the congressman was elected. But they have twice as many experts, and they send twice as many papers. We’re drowning in papers, Mitch! And the language.” He thumped the stack. “Can’t your people, all the biologists, just write to be understood? Don’t they realize how important it is to get the word out to everybody?”

Mitch let his hands drop by his sides. “They’re not my people, Dick. My people are archaeologists. They tend to write sparkling prose.”

Gianelli laughed, stood up from the couch and shook out his arms, then tipped a finger under his tight collar, as if letting out steam. His office was part of the suite assigned to Representative Dale Wickham, D., Virginia, whom he had faithfully served as director of public science for two of the toughest terms in U.S. history. The door to Wickham’s office was closed. He was on the Hill today.

“The congressman has made his views clear for years now. Your colleagues, scientists all, have hopped on the gravy train. They’ve joined up with NIH and CDC and Emergency Action, and they pay their visits mostly across the aisle. Wilson at FEMA and Doyle at DOJ have undercut us every step of the way, squirming like puppies to get their funding treats. Opposing them is like standing outside in a hail of cannonballs.”

“So what can I take home with me?” Mitch asked. “To cheer up the missus. Any good news?”

Gianelli shrugged. Mitch liked Gianelli but doubted he would live to see fifty. Gianelli had all the markers: pear shape, excessive girth, ghostly skin, thinning black hair, creased earlobes. He knew it, too. He worked hard and cared too much and swallowed his disappointments. A good man in a bad time. “We got caught in a medical bear trap,” he said. “We’ve never been prepared. Our best model for an epidemic was military response. So now we’ve had ten years of Emergency Action. We’ve practically signed away our country to Beltway bureaucrats with military and law enforcement training. Mark Augustine’s crew, Mitch. We’ve given them almost absolute authority.”

“I don’t think I’m capable of understanding how those people think,” Mitch said.

“I thought I did, once,” Gianelli said. “We tried to build a coalition. The congressman roped in Christian groups, the NRA, conspiracy nuts, flag burners and flag lovers, anybody who’s ever expressed a shred of suspicion about the guv’ment. We’ve gone hat in hand to every decent judge, every civil libertarian still above ground, literally and figuratively. We’ve been checked every step of the way. It was made very clear to the congressman that if he threw up any more dust, he, personally, all on his lonesome, could force the president to declare martial law.”

“What’s the difference, Dick?” Mitch asked. “They’ve suspended habeas corpus.”

“For a special class, Mitch.”

“My daughter,” Mitch growled.

Gianelli nodded. “Civil courts still operate, though under special guidelines. Nothing much has changed for the frightened average citizen, who’s kind of fuzzy about civil rights anyway. When Mark Augustine put together Emergency Action, he wove a tight little piece of legislative fabric. He made sure every agency ever involved in managing disease and preparing for natural disaster had a piece of the pie—and a very smelly pie it is. We’ve created a new and vulnerable underclass, with fewer civil protections than any since slavery. This sort of stuff attracts the real sharks, Mitch. The monsters.”

“All they have are hatred and fear.”

“In this town, that’s a full house,” Gianelli said. “Washington eats truth and shits spin.” He stood. “We can’t challenge Emergency Action. Not this session. They’re stronger than ever. Maybe next year.”

Mitch watched Gianelli pace a circuit of the room. “I can’t wait that long. Riverside, Dick.”

Gianelli folded his hands. He would not meet Mitch’s eyes.

“The mob torched one of Augustine’s goddamned camps,” Mitch said. “They burned the children in their barracks. They poured gasoline around the pilings and lit them up. The guards just stood back and watched. Two hundred kids roasted to death. Kids just like my daughter.”

Gianelli put on a mask of public sympathy, but underneath it, Mitch could see the real pain.

“There haven’t even been arrests,” he added.

“You can’t arrest a city, Mitch. Even the New York Times calls them virus children now. Everyone’s scared.”

“There hasn’t been a case of Shiver in ten years. It was a fluke, Dick. An excuse for some people to trample on everything this country has ever stood for.”

Gianelli squinted at Mitch but did not challenge this appraisal. “There isn’t much more the congressman can do,” he said.

“I don’t believe that.”

Gianelli reached into his desk drawer and took out a bottle of Tums. “Everyone around here has fire in the belly. I have heartburn.”

“Give me something to take home, Dick. Please. We need hope,” Mitch said.

“Show me your hands, Mitch.”

Mitch held up his hands. The calluses had faded, but they were still there. Gianelli held his own hands beside Mitch’s. They were smooth and pink. “Want to really learn how to suck eggs, from an old hound dog? I’ve spent ten years with Wickham. He’s the smartest hound there is, but he’s up against a bad lot. The Republicans are the country’s pit bulls, Mitch. Barking in the night, all night, every night, right or wrong, and savaging their enemies without mercy. They claim to represent plain folks, but they represent those who vote, when they vote at all, on pocketbooks and fear and gut instinct. They control the House and the Senate, they stacked the court the last three terms, their man is in the White House, and bless them, they speak with one voice, Mitch. The president is dug in. But you know what the congressman thinks? He thinks the president doesn’t want Emergency Action to be his legacy. Eventually, maybe we can do something with that.” Gianelli’s voice dropped very low, as if he were about to blaspheme in the temple. “But not now. The Democrats can’t even hold a bake sale without arguing. We’re weak and getting weaker.”

He held out his hand. “The congressman will be back any minute. Mitch, you look like you haven’t slept in weeks.”

Mitch shrugged. “I lie awake listening for trucks. I hate being so far from Kaye and Stella.”

“How far?”

Mitch looked up from under his solid line of eyebrow and shook his head.

“Right,” Gianelli said. “Sorry.”

7

SPOTSYLVANIA COUNTY

The old frame house snapped and popped in the morning heat. A moist breeze blew through the small rooms in lazy swirls. Kaye walked from the bedroom to the bathroom, rubbing her eyes. She had awakened from a peculiar dream in which she was an atom slowly rising to connect with a much larger molecule, to fit in and complete something truly impressive. She felt at peace for the first time in months, despite the barbed memory of last night’s fight.

Kaye massaged the fingers of her right hand, then wriggled her wedding ring over a swollen knuckle into its familiar groove. Bees droned in the oleanders outside the window, well into their day’s work.

“Some dream,” she told herself in the bathroom mirror. She pulled down one eyelid with a finger and stared at herself speculatively. “Under a little stress, are we?”

A few freckles remained under each eye from her pregnancy with Stella; when she was upset, they could still change from pale tan to ruddy ocher. Now, they were darker but not vivid. She splashed water on her cheeks and clipped her hair back, preparing for the hot day, ready to face more difficulties. Families were about staying together and healing.

If the bees can do it, so can I.

“Stella,” she called, knocking on her daughter’s bedroom door. “It’s nine o’clock. We slept in.”

Kaye padded into the small office in the laundry room and switched on the computer. She read the lines she had written before the squabble last night, then scrolled back through the last few pages:

“The role of SHEVA in the production of a new subspecies is but one function performed by this diverse and essential class of viruses. ERV and transposons—jumping genes—play large roles in tissue differentiation and development. Emotion and crisis and changing environments activate them, one variety at a time, or all together. They are mediators and messengers between cells, ferrying genes and coded data around many parts of the body, and even between individuals.

“Viruses and transposons most likely arose after the invention of sex, perhaps because of sex. To this day, sex brings them opportunity to move and carry information. They may have also emerged during the tumultuous genetic shuffling of our early immune system, like soldiers and cops running wild.

“Truly they are like original sin. How does sin shape our destiny?”

Kaye used a stylus to circle that last awkward, overreaching sentence. She marked it out and read some more.

“One thing we know already: We depend on retroviral and transposon activity during nearly every stage of our growth. Many are necessary partners.

“To assume that viruses and transposable elements are first and foremost causes of disease is like assuming that automobiles are first and foremost meant to kill people.

“Pathogens—disease-causing organisms—are like hormones and other signaling molecules, but their message is challenge and silence. Our own internal lions, pathogens test us. They winnow the old and weak. They sculpt life.

“Sometimes they bring down the young and the good. Nature is painful. Disease and death are part of our response to challenge. To fail, to die, is still to be part of nature, for success is built on many failures, and silence is also a signal.”

Her frame of mind had become increasingly abstract. The dream, the drone of the bees…

You were born with a caul, my dear.

Kaye suddenly remembered the voice of her maternal grandmother, Evelyn; words from nearly four decades ago. At the age of eight, Evelyn had told her something that her mother, a practical woman, had never thought to mention. “You came into this world with your tiny head covered. You were born with a caul. I was there, in the hospital with your mother. I saw it myself. The doctor showed it to me.”

Kaye remembered squirming with delicious anticipation in her grandmother’s ample lap and asking what a caul was. “A cap of loose flesh,” Evelyn had explained. “Some say it’s a mark of extraordinary understanding, even second sight. A caul warns us that you will learn things most others will never comprehend, and you will always be frustrated trying to explain what you know, and what seems so obvious to you. It’s supposed to be both a blessing and a curse.” Then the older woman had added, in a soft voice, “I was born with a caul, my dear, and your grandfather has never understood me.”

Kaye had loved Evelyn very much, but at times had thought her a little spooky. She returned her attention to the text on the monitor. She did not delete the paragraphs, but she did draw a large asterisk and exclamation point beside them. Then she saved the file and pushed the chair under the desk.

Four pages yesterday. A good day’s work. Not that it would ever see the light of day in any respectable journal. For the last eight years, all of her papers had appeared on clandestine Web sites.

Kaye listened closely to the morning house, as if to measure the day ahead. A curtain pull flapped against a window frame. Cardinals whistled in the maple tree outside.

She could not hear her daughter stirring.

“Stella!” she called, louder. “Breakfast. Want some oatmeal?”

No answer.

She walked in flapping slippers down the short hallway to Stella’s room. Stella’s bed was made but rumpled, as if she had been lying on it, tossing and turning. A bouquet of dried flowers, tied with a rubber band, rested on the pillow. A short stack of books had been tipped over beside the bed. On the sill, three stuffed Shrooz, about the size of guinea pigs, red and green and the very rare black and gold, hung their long noses into the room. More cascaded from the cedar chest at the foot of the bed. Stella loved Shrooz because they were grumpy; they whined and squirmed and then groaned when moved.

Kaye searched the big backyard, tall brown grass faded into ivy and kudzu under the big old trees at the edge of the property. She could not afford to let her attention lapse even for a minute.

Then she returned to the house and Stella’s bedroom. She got down on her knees and peered under the bed. Stella had made a scent diary, a small blank book filled with cryptic writing and dated records of her emotions, scents collected from behind her ears and dabbed on each page. Stella kept it hidden, but Kaye had found it once while cleaning and had figured it out.

Kaye pushed her hands through the balls of dust and cat toys beneath the bed and thrust her fingers deep into the shadows. The book was not there.

Peace the illusion, peace the trap, no rest, no letting down her guard. Stella was gone. Taking the book meant she was serious.

Still shod in slippers, Kaye pushed through the gate and ran up the oak-lined street. She whispered, “Don’t panic, keep it together, God damn it.” The muscles in her neck knotted.

A quarter of a mile away, in front of the next house down the road in the rural neighborhood, she slowed to a walk, then stood in the middle of the cracked asphalt road, hugging herself, small and tense, like a mouse waiting for a hawk.

Kaye shaded her eyes against the sun and looked up at bloated gray clouds advancing shoulder to shoulder along the southern horizon. The air smelled sullen and jumpy.

If Stella had planned this, she would have run off after Mitch left for Washington. Mitch had left between six and seven. That meant her daughter had at least an hour’s head start. That realization shoved an icicle down Kaye’s spine.

Calling the police was not wise. Five years ago, Virginia had reluctantly acquiesced to Emergency Action and had begun rounding up the new children and sending them to camps in Iowa, Nebraska, and Ohio. Years ago, Kaye and Mitch had withdrawn from parent support groups after a rash of FBI infiltrations. Mitch had assumed that Kaye in particular was a target for surveillance and possibly even arrest.

They were on their own. They had decided that was the safest course.

Kaye took off her slippers and ran barefoot back to the house. She would have to think like Stella and that was difficult. Kaye had observed her daughter as a mother and as a scientist for eleven years, and there had always been a small but important distance between them that she could not cross. Stella deliberated with a thoroughness Kaye admired, but reached conclusions she often found mystifying.

Kaye grabbed her handbag with her wallet and ID, pulled on her garden shoes, and exited through the back door. The small primer gray Toyota truck started instantly. Mitch maintained both their vehicles. She ground the tires down the dirt driveway, then caught herself and drove slowly along the country lane.

“Please,” she muttered, “no rides.”

8

Walking along the dirt margin of the asphalt road, Stella swung the plastic Gatorade bottle, rationing herself to a sip every few minutes. An old farm field plowed and marked for a new strip mall stretched to her right. Stella tightrope-walked a freshly cured concrete curb, not yet out of its mold boards. The sun was climbing in the east, black clouds stacked high in the south, and the air spun hot and full of the fragrances of dogwood and sycamore. The exhaust of cars going by, and a descending tail of carbon from a diesel truck, clogged her nose.

She felt at long last that she was doing something worthwhile. There was guilt, but she pushed aside concern for what her parents would think. Somewhere on this road she might meet someone who would not argue with her instincts, who would not feel pain simply because Stella existed. Someone like herself.

All her life she had lived among one kind of human, but she was another. An old virus called SHEVA had broken loose from human DNA and rearranged human genes. Stella and a generation of children like her were the result. This was what her parents had told her.

Not a freak. Just a different kind.

Stella Nova Rafelson was eleven years old. She felt as if she had been peculiarly alone all her life.

She sometimes thought of herself as a star, a bright little point in a very big sky. Humans filled the sky by the billions and washed her out like the blinding sun.

9

Kaye swung left just beyond the courthouse, turned the corner, drove half a block, and pulled into a gas station. When she had been a child, there had been little rubber-coated trip wires that caused a bell to ding whenever a car arrived. There were no longer any wires, no bell, and nobody came out to see what Kaye needed. She parked by the bright red-and-white convenience store and wiped tears from her eyes.

She sat for a minute in the Toyota, trying to focus.

Stella had a red plastic coin purse that held ten dollars in emergency money. There was a drinking fountain in the courthouse, but Kaye thought Stella would prefer something cold, sweet, and fruity. Odors of artificial strawberry and raspberry that Kaye found repugnant, Stella would wallow in like a cat in a bed of catnip. “It’s a long walk,” Kaye told herself. “It’s hot. She’s thirsty. It’s her day out, away from mom.” She bit her lip.

Kaye and Mitch had protected Stella like a rare orchid throughout her short life. Kaye knew that, hated the necessity of it. It was how they had stayed together. Her daughter’s freedom depended on it. The chat rooms were full of the agonized stories of parents giving up their children, watching them be sent to Emergency Action schools in another state. The camps.

Mitch, Stella, and Kaye had lived a dreamy, tense, unreal existence, no way for an energetic, outgoing young girl to grow up, no way for Mitch to stay sane. Kaye tried not to think too much about herself or what was happening between her and Mitch, she might just snap, and then where would they be? But their difficulties had obviously had an effect on Stella. She was a daddy’s girl, to Kaye’s pride and secret sadness—she had once been a daddy’s girl, too, before both her parents had died, over twenty years ago—and Mitch had been gone a lot lately.

Kaye entered the store through the glass double doors. The clerk, a thin, tired-looking woman a little younger than Kaye, had out a mop and bucket and was grimly spraying the counter and floor with Lysol.

“Excuse me, did you see a girl, tall, about eleven?”

The clerk raised the mop like a lance and poked it at her.

10

WASHINGTON, D.C.

A tall, stooped man with thinning white hair sauntered into the office carrying a worn briefcase. Gianelli stood up. “Congressman, you remember Mitch Rafelson.”

“I do, indeed,” Wickham said, and held out his hand. Mitch shook it firmly. The hand was dry and hard as wood. “Does anybody know you’re here, Mitch?”

“Dick snuck me in, sir.”

Wickham appraised Mitch with a slight tremor of his head. “Come over to my office, Mitch,” the congressman said. “You, too, Dick, and close the door behind you.”

They walked across the hall. Wickham’s office was covered with plaques and photos, a lifetime of politics.

“Justice Barnhall had a heart attack this morning at ten,” Wickham said.

Mitch’s face fell. Barnhall had consistently championed civil rights, even for SHEVA children and their parents.

“He’s in Bethesda,” Wickham said. “They don’t hold out much hope. The man is ninety years old. I’ve just been speaking with the Senate minority leader. We’re going to the White House tomorrow morning.” Wickham laid his briefcase down on a couch and stuck his hands in the pockets of his chocolate brown slacks. “Justice Barnhall was one of the good guys. Now the president wants Olsen, and he’s a corker, Mitch. We haven’t seen his like since Roger B. Taney. A lifelong bachelor, face like a stoat, mind like a steel trap. Wants to undo eighty years of so-called judicial activism, thinks he’ll have the country by the balls, six to three. And he probably will. We’re not going to win this round, but we can land a few punches. Then, they’ll lash us on the votes. We’re going to get creamed.” Wickham stared sadly at Mitch. “I do love a fair fight.”

The secretary knocked on the door jamb. “Congressman, is Mr. Rafelson here?” She looked right at Mitch, one eyebrow cocked.

Gianelli asked, “Who wants to know?”

“Won’t use her name and sounds upset. System board says she’s on a disposable cell phone using an offshore line. That’s no longer legal, sir.”

“You don’t say,” Wickham said, looking out the window.

“My wife knows I’m here. No one else,” Mitch said.

“Get her number and call her back, Connie,” Wickham said. “Put it on the puzzler, and route it through, oh, Tom Haney’s office in Boca Raton.”

“Yes, sir.”

Wickham gestured toward his desk phone. “We can link her line to a special scrambler for congressional office communications,” he said, but tapped his wristwatch. “Starts and ends with garbage, and unless you know the key, it all sounds like garbage. We change the key every call. Takes NSA about a minute or so to break it, so keep it short.”

The secretary made the connection. Mitch stared between the two men, his heart sinking, and picked up the receiver on the desk.

11

SPOTSYLVANIA COUNTY

Stella sat in the shade of an old wooden bus shelter, clutching her book to her chest. She had been sitting there for an hour and a half. The Gatorade bottle was long since empty and she was thirsty. The morning heat was stifling and the sky was clouding over. The air had thickened with that spooky electric dampness that meant a big storm was brewing. All of her emotions had flip-flopped. “I’ve been really stupid,” she told herself. “Kaye will be so mad.”

Kaye seldom showed her anger. Mitch, when he was home, was the one who paced and shook his head and clenched his fists when things got tense. But Stella could tell when Kaye was angry. Her mother could get just as angry as Mitch, though in a quiet way.

Stella hated anger in the house. It smelled like old cockroaches.

Kaye and Mitch never took it out on Stella. Both treated her with patient tenderness, even when they clearly did not want to, and that made Stella feel what she called steepy, odd and different and apart.

Stella had made up that word, steepy, and lots of others, most of which she kept to herself.

It was tough to be responsible for a lot, and maybe all, of their anger. Hard to know she was to blame for Mitch not being able to go dig up pottery and middens, old garbage dumps, and for Kaye not being able to work in a lab or teach or do anything but write articles and books that somehow never got published or even finished.

Stella knit her long fingers and raised her knee, filling the hollow of the fingers and tugging her arms straight. She heard a vehicle and pushed back into the shadow of the enclosure, lifting her feet into the gloom. A red Ford pickup drove slowly by, clean, new, with a smooth white plastic camper on the back. The camper had a square shiny little door made of smoky plastic in the rear. It looked expensive, much nicer than the little Toyota truck or Mitch’s old Dodge Intrepid.

The red truck slowed, stopped, shifted smoothly into reverse, and backed up. Stella tried to squeeze into the corner, her back pressed against splintery wood. She suddenly just wanted to go home. She could find her way back, she was sure of it; she could find it by the smell of the trees. But car exhaust and pretty soon rain would make that harder. The rain would make it much harder.

The truck stopped and the engine switched off. The driver opened his door and got out on the side away from Stella. She could only see a little bit of him through the truck’s tinted windows. He had gray hair and a beard. He walked slowly around the truck bed and camper, the shadows of his legs visible under the frame.

“Hello, Miss,” he said, stopping a respectful four or five yards from where she was trying to hide. He put his hands in the pockets of his khaki shorts. In his mouth he clenched an unlit pipe. He adjusted the pipe with one hand, removed it, pointed it at her. “You live around here?”

Stella nodded in the shadow.

His goatee was all gray and neatly trimmed. He was potbellied but dressed neatly, and his calf-high socks and running shoes were clean and white. He smelled confident, what she could smell behind thick swipes of deodorant and the rum-and-cherry-scented tobacco tamped into the pipe.

“You should be with your family and friends,” he said.

“I’m heading home,” Stella said.

“Bus won’t come by again until this evening. Only two stops a day here.”

“I’m walking.”

“Well, that’s fine. You shouldn’t take rides with strangers.”

“I know.”

“Can I help? Make a phone call to your folks?”

Stella said nothing. They had one secure phone at home, strictly for emergencies, and they bought disposable cell phones for occasional use. They always used a kind of family code when they talked, even with the disposables, but Mitch said they could identify your voice no matter how much you tried to change it.

She wanted the man in shorts to go away.

“Are your folks at home, Miss?”

Stella looked up at the sun peeking through the clouds.

“If you’re alone, I know some people who can help,” he said. “Special friends. Listen. I made a recording of them.” He dug in his back pocket and pulled out a small recorder. He pressed a button and held out the machine for her to listen.

She had heard such songs and whistles before, on TV and on the radio. When she had been three, she had heard a boy sing songs like that, too. And a few years ago, in the house in Richmond, the big brick house with the iron gate and the guard dogs and four couples, nervous, thin people who seemed to have a lot of money, bringing their children together to play around an indoor swimming pool. She vividly remembered listening to their singing and being too shy to join in. Sweet interweaves of tunes, like meadowlarks singing their hearts out in a berry patch, as Mitch had said.

That was what she heard coming from the recorder.

Voices like hers.

Big drops of rain left crayon-jabs of wetness on the road and in the dirt. The sky and trees behind the man with the goatee flared icy white against the charcoal gray of the sky.

“It’s going to get wet,” the man said. “Miss, it isn’t good to be out here by yourself. Heck, this shelter could even attract lightning, who knows?” He pulled a cell phone from his back pocket. “Can I call someone for you? Your mom or dad?”

He didn’t smell bad. In fact, he did not smell of much at all except for the rum-and-cherry tobacco. She had to learn how to judge people and even take chances. It was the only way to get along. She made a decision. “Could you call?” Stella asked.

“Sure,” he said. “Just tell me their number.”

12

LEESBURG

Mark Augustine placed his hand on the back of Rachel Browning’s chair. The room was quiet except for the hum of equipment fans and a faint clicking noise.

They were watching the plump man in khaki shorts, the red truck, the lanky, awkward girl that was Kaye Lang Rafelson’s daughter.

A virus child.

“Is that your stringer, Rachel?”

“I don’t know,” Browning said.

“A good Samaritan, maybe?” Augustine asked. Internally, he was furious, but would not give Browning the satisfaction of showing it. “He could be a child molester.”

For the first time, Browning revealed uncertainty. “Any suggestions?” she asked.

Augustine felt no relief that she was asking his advice. This would simply involve him in her chain of decisions, and that was the last thing he wanted. Let her hang herself, all by herself.

“If things are going wrong, I need to make some calls,” he said.

“We should wait,” Browning said. “It’s probably okay.”

The Little Bird hovered about thirty feet above the red truck and the bus stop, the paunchy middle-aged man and the young girl.

Augustine’s hand tightened on the back of the chair.

13

SPOTSYLVANIA COUNTY

The rain fell heavily and the air got darker as they climbed into the truck. Too late Stella noticed that the man had stuffed waxed cotton up his nose. He sat on the bench seat behind the wheel and offered her a mint Tic-Tac, but she hated mint. He popped two into his mouth and gestured with the phone. “Nobody answers,” he said. “Daddy at work?”

She turned away.

“I can drop you at your house, but maybe, if it’s okay with you, I know some people would like to meet you,” he said.

She was going against everything her parents had ever told her, to give him the house number, to sit in his truck. But she had to do something, and it looked as if today was the day.

She had never walked so far from home. The rain would change everything about the air and the smells. “What’s your name?” she asked.

“Fred,” the man answered. “Fred Trinket. I know you’d like to meet them, and they surely would like to meet you.”

“Stop talking that way,” Stella said.

“What way?”

“I’m not an idiot.”

Fred Trinket had clogged his nose with cotton and his mouth sang with shrill mint.

“Of course,” he said reasonably. “I know that, honey. I have a shelter. A place for kids in trouble. Would you like to see some pictures?” Trinket asked. “They’re in the glove box.” He watched her, still smiling. He had a kind enough face, she decided. A little sad. He seemed concerned about how she felt. “Pictures of my kids, the ones on the recorder.”

Stella felt intensely curious. “Like me?” she asked.

“Just like you,” Fred said. “You’re sparking real pretty, you know that? The others spark the same way when they’re curious. Something to see.”

“What’s sparking?”

“Your freckles,” Fred said, pointing. “They spread out on your cheeks like butterfly wings. I’m used to seeing that at my shelter. I could call your house again, see if somebody’s home, tell your daddy or mama to meet us. Should I?”

He was getting nervous. She could smell that much, not that it meant anything. Everybody was nervous these days. He did not want to hurt her, she was pretty sure; there was nothing horny about his scent or his manner, and he did not smell of cigarettes or alcohol.

He did not smell anything like the young men in the convenience store.

She told herself again she would have to take chances if she wanted to get anywhere, if she wanted anything to change. “Yes,” she said.

Fred pushed redial. The cell phone beeped the tune of the house number. Still no answer. Her mother was probably out looking for her.

“Let’s go to my house,” Fred said. “It’s not far and there are cold drinks in the ice chest. Strawberry soda. Genuine Nehi in long-necked bottles. I’ll call your mama again when we get there.”

She swallowed hard, opened the glove box, and pulled out a packet of color photos, five by sevens. The kids in the first photo, seven of them, were having a party, a birthday party, with a bright red cake. Fred stood in the background beside a plump older woman with a blank look. Other than Fred and the older woman, the kids at the party were all about her age. One boy might have been older, but he was standing in the background.

All like her. SHEVA children.

“Jesus,” Stella said.

“Easy on that,” Fred said amiably. “Jesus is Lord.”

The bumper sticker on Fred’s truck said that. On the tailgate was glued a golden plastic fish. The fish, labeled “Truth,” was eating another fish with legs, labeled “Darwin.”

Fred turned on the motor and put the truck in gear. The rain was falling in big hard drops, tapping on the roof and the hood like a million bored fingers.

“Battle of the Wilderness took place not far from here,” Fred said as he drove. He turned right carefully, as if worried about jostling precious cargo. “Civil War. Holy place in its way. Real quiet. I love it out this way. Less traffic, fewer condo-minimums, right?”

Stella leafed through the pictures again, found some more stuck in a plastic pocket. Seven different kids, mugging for the camera or staring at it seriously, some sitting in big chairs in a big house.

One boy had no expression at all. “Who’s this?” she asked Fred.

Fred spared a quick look. “That is Will. Strong Will, Mother calls him. He lived off snakes and squirrels before he came to our shelter.” Fred Trinket smiled and shook his head at the thought. “You’ll like him. And the others, too.”

14

The red truck pulled up to a two-story house with tall white columns. Two long brick planters filled with scrawny, dripping oleanders bordered the white steps. Fred Trinket had done nothing overt to upset Stella, but now they were at his house.

“It’s about lunchtime,” Trinket said. “The others will be eating. Mother feeds them about now. I eat later. It’s my digestion. None too good.”

“You eat oatmeal,” Stella said.

Trinket beamed. “That is right, young lady. I eat oatmeal for breakfast. Sometimes a single slice of bacon. What else?”

“You like garlic.”

“For dinner, I have spaghetti with garlic, that’s right.” Trinket shook his head happily. “Marvelous. You smell all that.”

He opened his door and came around. Stella got out and he pointed up the porch steps to the house. A big white door stood there, solid and patient, flanked by two tall, skinny windows. The paint was new. The doorknob reeked of Brasso, a smell she did not like. She did not touch the door. Trinket opened it for her. The door was not locked.

“We trust people,” Trinket said. “Mother!” he called. “We have a guest.”

15

Mitch pulled into the dirt driveway beneath a sodden gray sky. Kaye was not in the house when he arrived. She honked at him from the road as he came out after searching the empty house. His long legs took him in five quick strides to the old truck.

“How long?” Mitch asked, leaning in. He touched her wet cheeks through the driver’s side window.

“Three or four hours,” Kaye said. “I took a nap and she was gone.”

He got in beside her. Just as she put the truck in gear, Mitch held up his hand. “Phone,” he said. She cut the engine and they both listened. From the house came a faint ringing.

Mitch ran to the house. The screen door slammed behind him and he picked up on the fourth ring.

“Hello?”

“Is this Mr. Bailey?” a man asked.

That was the name they had told Stella to use.

“Yeah,” Mitch said, wiping rain from his brow and eyes. “Who’s this?”

“My name is Fred Trinket. I did not know you were living so near, Mr. Bailey.”

“I’m in a hurry, Mr. Trinket. Where’s my daughter?”

“Please don’t be upset. She’s in my house right now, and she’s very worried about you.”

“We’re worried about her. Where are you?”

“She’s fine, Mr. Rafelson. We’d like you to come and see something we think is interesting and important. Something you may very well find fascinating.” The man who called himself Trinket gave directions.

Mitch rejoined Kaye in the truck. “Someone has Stella,” he said.

“Emergency Action?”

“A teacher, a crank, somebody,” Mitch said. No time now to mention the man knew his real name. He did not think Stella would have told anyone that. “About ten miles from here.”

Kaye was already spinning the truck around on the road.

16

“There,” Trinket said, putting away the phone and drying his short hair with a towel. “Have you ever met with more than one or two of the children at a time?”

Stella did not answer for a moment, it was such an odd question. She wanted to think it over, even though she knew what he meant. She looked around the living room of the big house. The furniture was colonial, she knew from reading catalogs and magazines: maple with antique print fabric—butter churns, horse tack, plows. It was really ugly. The wallpaper was dark green flocked velvet with floral patterns that looked like sad faces. The entire room smelled of a citronella candle burning on a small side table, too sweet even for Stella’s tastes. There had been chicken cooking in the past hour, and broccoli.

“No,” she finally said.

“That is sad, isn’t it?”

The old woman, the same as in the photos, entered the room and looked at Stella with little interest. She walked in rubber-soled slippers with hardly any sound and held out a long-necked bottle of Nehi strawberry soda, brilliant red in the room’s warm glow.

Trinket was at least fifty. Stella guessed his mother might be seventy, plump, with strong-looking, corded arms, peach-colored skin with only a few wrinkles, and thin white hair arranged neatly on a pallid, taut scalp, like the worn head of a much-loved doll.

Stella was thirsty, but she did not take the bottle.

“Mother,” Trinket said, “I’ve called Stella’s parents.”

“No need,” the woman said, her tone flat. “We have groceries.”

Trinket winked at Stella. “We do indeed,” he said. “And chicken for lunch. What else, Stella?” he asked.

“Huh?”

“What else do we have to eat?”

“It’s not a game,” Stella said huffily.

“Broccoli, I’d guess,” Trinket answered for her, his lips forming a little bow. “Mother is a good cook, but predictable. Still, she helps me with the children.”

“I do,” the woman said.

“Where are they?” Stella asked.

“Mother does her best, but my wife was a better cook.”

“She died,” the old woman said, touching her hair with her free hand.

Stella looked at the floor in frustration. She heard someone talking, far off in the back.

“Is that them?” she asked, fascinated despite herself. She made a move toward the long, picture-lined hall on the right, following the sound of voices.

“Yes,” Trinket said. He shot a quick glance at the book in her hands. “Your parents kept you secluded, didn’t they? How selfish. Don’t we know, Mother, how selfish that would be for someone like Stella?”

“Alone,” his mother said, and abruptly turned and set the bottle down on the small table beside the candle. She rubbed her hands on her apron and waddled down the hallway. The combined sweetness of candle and Nehi threatened to make Stella dizzy. She had seen dogs whining to be with other dogs, to sniff them and exchange doggy greetings. That memory brought her up short.

She thought of the two men in the Texaco minimart.

You smell as good as a dog.

She shivered.

“Your parents were protecting you, but it was still cruel,” Trinket said, watching her. Stella kept her eyes on the hallway. The wish that had haunted her for weeks now, months if she thought back that far, was suddenly strong in her, making her dull and steepy.

“Not to be with your own kind, not to bathe in the air of another, and not to speak the way you all do, such lovely doubling, that is painfully lonely-making, isn’t it?”

Her cheeks felt hot. Trinket studied her cheeks. “Your people are so beautiful,” he said, his eyes going soft. “I could watch you all day.”

“Why?” Stella asked sharply.

“Beg pardon?” Trinket smiled, and this time there was something in the smile that was wrong. Stella did not like being the center of attention. But she wanted to meet the others, more than anything on Earth or in the heavens, as Mitch’s father might have said.

Stella’s grandfather, Sam, had died five years ago.

“I do not run an accredited school, nor a day care, nor a center of learning,” Trinket said. “I try to teach what I can, but mostly I—Mother and I—create a brief refuge, away from the cruel people who hate and fear. We neither hate nor fear. We admire. In my way, I’m an anthropologist.”

“Can I meet them now?” Stella asked.

Trinket sat on the couch with a radiant grin. “Tell me more about your mother and father. They’re well known in some circles. Your mother discovered the virus, right? And your father found the famous mummies in the Alps. The harbingers of our own fate.”

The sweet scents in the room blocked some human odors, but not aggression, not fear. Those she would still be able to smell, like a steel spoon stuck in vanilla ice cream. Trinket did not smell mean or fearful, so she did not feel she was in immediate danger. Still, he wore nose plugs. And how did he know so much about Kaye and Mitch?

Trinket leaned forward on the couch and touched his nostrils. “You’re worried about these.”

Stella turned away. “Let me see the others,” she said.

Trinket snorted a laugh. “I can’t be in a crowd of you without these,” Trinket said. “I’m sensitive, oh yes. I had a daughter like you. My wife and I acquired the masks and knew the special scents my daughter made. Then, my wife died. She died in pain.” He stared at the ceiling, his eyes wet pools of sentiment. “I miss her,” Trinket said, and slapped his hand suddenly on the bolster of the couch. “Mother!”

The blank-faced woman returned.

“See if they’ve finished their lunch,” Trinket said. “Then let’s introduce Stella.”

“Will she eat?” the older woman asked, her eyes unconcerned either way.

“I don’t know. That depends,” Fred Trinket said. He looked at his watch. “I hope your parents haven’t lost their way. Maybe you should call them… in a few minutes, just to make sure?”

17

Kaye pulled the Toyota truck to the side of the rutted dirt road and dropped her head onto the wheel. The rain had stopped, but they had nearly gotten their wheels stuck in mud several times. She moaned.

Mitch threw open the door. “This is the road. This is the address. Shit!”

He flung the crumpled piece of paper into a wet ditch. The only house here had been boarded up for a long time, and half of it had slumped into cinders after a fire. Five or six acres of weed-grown farm ground surrounded them, sullen behind a veil of low mist. Streamers of cloud played hide-and-seek with a watery sun. The house was bright, then dark, beneath the coming and going of those wide gray fingers.

“Maybe he doesn’t have her.” Kaye looked at Mitch through the open door.

“I could have transposed a number,” Mitch said, leaning against the cab.

His cell phone rang. They both jerked as if stuck with pins. Mitch pulled the phone out and said, “Yes.” The phone recognized his voice and announced that the calling party’s number was blocked, then asked if he would take the call anyway.

“Yes,” he said, without thinking.

“Daddy?” The voice on the other end was tense, high-pitched, but it sounded like Stella’s.

“Where are you?”

“Is that you? Daddy?” The voice went through a digital bird fight and steadied. He had never heard that sort of sound before and it worried him.

“It’s me, honey. Where are you?”

“I’m at this house. I saw the house number on the mail box.”

Mitch pulled a pen and pad from his inside coat pocket and wrote down the number and road.

“Stay tight, Stella, and don’t let anyone touch you,” he said, working to steady his voice. “We’re on our way.” He reluctantly said good-bye and closed the phone. His face was like red sandstone, he was so furious.

“Is she okay?”

Mitch nodded, then opened the phone again and punched in another number.

“Who are you calling?”

“State police,” he said.

“We can’t!” Kaye cried. “They’ll take her!”

“It’s too late to worry about that,” Mitch said. “This guy’s going for bounty, and he wants all of us.”

18

So many pictures in the hall leading to the back of the house. Generation after generation of Trinkets, Stella assumed, from faded color snapshots clustered in a single frame to larger, sepia-colored prints showing men and women and children wearing stiff brown clothes and peering with pinched expressions, as if the eyes of the future scared them.

“Our legacy,” Fred Trinket told her. “Old genes. All those arrangements, gone!” He grinned and walked ahead, his shoulders rolling with each step. He had a fat back, Stella saw. Fat neck and fat back. His calves were taut, however, as if he did a lot of walking, but pale and hairy. Perhaps he walked at night.

Trinket pushed open a screen door.

“Let me know if she wants lunch,” the mother said from the kitchen, halfway up the hall and to the left. As Mrs. Trinket dried a dish, Stella saw a dark, damp towel flick out of the kitchen like a snake’s tongue.

“Yes, Mother,” Trinket murmured. “This way, Miss Rafelson.”

He descended a short flight of wooden steps and walked across the gravel path to a long, dark building about ten paces beyond. Stella saw a doghouse but no dog, and a small orchard of clothes trees spinning slowly in the wind after the storm, their lines empty.

Along would come Mother Trinket, Stella thought, and pin up the laundry, and it would be clothes tree springtime. When the clothes were dry she would pull them down and stuff them in her basket and it would be winter again. Expressionless Mother Trinket was the seasonal heart of the old house, mistress of the backyard.

Stella’s mouth was dry. Her nose hurt. She touched behind her ears where it itched when she was nervous. Her finger came away waxy. She wanted to take a washcloth and remove all the old scents, clean herself for the people in the long outbuilding. A word came to her: prensing, preening and cleansing. It was a lovely word and it made her tremble like a leaf.

Trinket unlocked the door to the rear building. Inside, Stella saw fluorescent lights sputter on, bright and blue, over workbenches, an old refrigerator, stacked cardboard boxes, and, to the right, a strong wire mesh door.

The voices grew louder. Stella thought she heard three or four. They were speaking in a way she could not understand—low, guttural, with piping high exclamations. Someone coughed.

“They’re inside,” Trinket said. He unlocked the wire door with a brass key tied to a dirty length of twine. “They just finished eating. We’ll fetch the trays for Mother.” He pulled the mesh door open.

Stella did not move. Not even the promise of the voices, the promise that had brought her this far, could persuade her to take another step.

“There are four inside, just like you. They need your help. I’ll go in with you.”

“Why the lock?” Stella asked.

“People drive around, sometimes they have guns… take potshots. Just not safe,” Trinket said. “It’s not safe for your kind. Since my wife’s death, I’ve made it one of my jobs, my duty, to protect those I come across on the road. Youngsters like you.”

“Where’s your daughter?” Stella asked.

“She’s in Idaho.”

“I don’t believe you,” Stella said.

“Oh, it’s true. They took her away last year. I’ve never been to visit her.”

“They let parents visit sometimes.”

“I just can’t bear the thought of going.” His expression had changed, and his smell, too.

“You’re lying,” Stella said. She could feel her glands working, itching. Stella could not smell it herself, could not in fact smell anything her nose was so dry, but she knew the room was thick with her persuasion scent.

Trinket seemed to deflate, arms dropping, hands relaxing. He pointed to the wire mesh door. He was thinking, or waiting. Stella moved away. The key dangled from the rope in his hand. “Your people,” he said, and scratched his nose.

“Let us go,” Stella said. It was more than a suggestion.

Trinket shook his head slowly, then lifted his eyes. She thought she might be having an effect on him, despite his nose plugs and the mints.

“Let us all go,” Stella said.

The old woman came in so quietly Stella did not hear her. She was surprisingly strong. She grabbed Stella around the ribs, pinning her arms and making her squeak like a mouse, and shoved her through the door. Her book fell to the floor. Trinket swung up and caught the key on its string, then slammed and locked the gate before Stella could turn around.

“They’re lonely in there,” Trinket’s mother told Stella. She wore a clothespin on her nose and her eyes were watering. “Let my son do his work. Fred, maybe now she’d like some lunch.”

Trinket took out a handkerchief and blew his nose, expelling the plugs. He looked at them in disgust, then pushed a button mounted on the wall. A lock clicked and buzzed and another wire door behind her popped open. Stella faced them through the mesh of the first door. She could not make a sound at first, she was so startled and so angry.

Trinket rubbed his eyes and shook his head. He gave a little kick and spun her book into the far corner. “Damn,” he said. “She’s good. She almost had me. Hellish little skunk.”

She stood shivering in the little cubicle. Trinket turned out the fluorescent lights. That left only the reflected glow from the rooms behind her.

A hand touched her elbow.

Stella screamed.

“What?”

She backed up against the mesh and stared at a boy. He was ten or eleven, taller than her by a couple of inches, and, if anything, skinnier. He had scratches on his face and his hair was unkempt and tufty.

“I didn’t mean to scare you,” the boy said. His cheeks flushed in little spots of pink and brown. His gold-flecked eyes followed her as she sidled to the left, into the corner, and held up her fists.

The boy’s nose wrinkled. “Wow,” he said. “You’re really shook.”

“What’s your name?” she asked, her voice high.

“What sort of name?” he asked. He leaned over, twisted his head, inhaled the air in front of her, and made a sour face.

“They scared me,” she explained, embarrassed.

“Yeah, I can tell.”

“Who are you?” she asked.

“Look,” he said, leaning forward, and his cheeks freckled again.

“So?”

He looked disappointed. “Some can do it.”

“What do your parents call you?”

“I don’t know. Kids call me Kevin. We live out in the woods. Mixed group. Not anymore. Trinket got me. I was stupid.”

Stella straightened and lowered her fists. “How many are in here?”

“Four, including me. Now, five.”

She heard the coughing again. “Somebody sick?”

“Yeah.”

“I’ve never been sick,” Stella said.

“Neither have I. Free Shape is sick.”

“Who?”

“I call her Free Shape. It’s not her name, probably. She’s almost as old as me.”

“Is Strong Will still here?”

“He doesn’t like that name. They call us names like that because they say we stink. Come on back. Nobody’s going anywhere soon, right? They sent me out here to see who else old Fred snared.”

Stella followed Kevin to the back of the long building. They passed four empty rooms equipped with cots and folding chairs and cheap old dressers.

At the very back, three young people sat around a small portable television. Stella hated television, never watched it. She saw that the television’s control panel had been covered with a metal plate. Two—an older boy, Will, Stella guessed, and a younger girl, no more than seven—sat on a battered gray couch. The third, a girl of nine or ten, curled up on a blanket on the floor.

The girl smelled bad. She smelled sick. She coughed into her palm and wiped it on her T-shirt without taking her eyes away from the television.

Will pushed off the couch and stood. He looked Stella over cautiously, then stuck his hands in his pockets. “This is Mabel,” he said, introducing the younger girl. “Or Maybelle. She doesn’t know. Girl on the floor doesn’t say much. I’m Will. I’m the oldest. I’m always the oldest. I may be the oldest alive.”

“Hello,” Stella said.

“New girl,” Kevin explained. “She smells really shook.”

“You do,” Mabel said and lifted her upper lip, then pinched the end of her nose.

Will looked back at Stella. “I can see your freckle name. But what’s your other name?”

“I think maybe her name is Rose or Daisy,” Kevin said.

“My parents call me Stella,” she said, her tone implying she wasn’t stuck with it; she could change the name anytime. She knelt beside the sick girl. “What’s wrong with her?”

“It isn’t a cold and it isn’t flu,” Will said. “I wouldn’t get too close. We don’t know where she comes from.”

“She needs a doctor,” Stella said.

“Tell that to the old mother when she brings your food,” Kevin suggested. “Just kidding. She won’t do anything. I think they’re going to turn us in, all at once, together.”

“That’s the way Fred makes his moochie,” Will said, rubbing his fingers together. “Bounty.”

Stella touched the sick girl’s shoulder. She looked up at Stella and closed her eyes. “Don’t look. Nothing to see,” the girl said. Her cheeks formed simple patterns, shapeless. Free Shape. Stella pushed harder on the girl’s arm. The arm went limp and she rolled onto her back. Stella shook her again and her eyes opened halfway, unfocused. “Mommy?”

“What’s your name?” Stella asked.

“Mommy?”

“What does Mommy call you?”

“Elvira,” the girl said, and coughed again.

“Ha ha,” Will said without humor. That was a cruel joke name.

“You have parents?” Kevin asked the girl, following Stella’s lead and kneeling.

Stella touched Elvira’s face. The skin was dry and hot and there was a bloody crust under her nose and also behind her ears. Stella felt beneath her jaw and then lifted her arms and felt there. “She has an infection,” Stella said. “Like mumps, maybe.”

“How do you know?”

“My mother is a doctor. Sort of.”

“Is it Shiver?” Will asked.

“I don’t think so. We don’t get that.” She looked up at Will and felt her cheeks signal a message, she did not know what: embarrassment, maybe.

“Look at me,” Will said. Stella got to her feet and faced him.

“You know how to talk this way?” he asked. His cheeks freckled and cleared. The dapple patterns came and went quickly, and synchronized somehow with the irises of his eyes, his facial muscles, and little sounds he made deep in his throat. Stella watched, fascinated, but had no idea what he was doing, what he was trying to convey. “I guess not. What do you smell, little deer?”

Stella felt her nose burn. She drew back.

“Practically illiterate,” Will said, but his smile was sympathetic. “It’s the Talk. Kids in the woods made it up.”

Stella realized Will wanted to be in charge, wanted people to think he was smart and capable. There was a weakness in his scent, however, that made him seem very vulnerable. He’s broken, she thought.

Elvira moaned and called for her mother. Will knelt and touched the girl’s forehead. “Her parents hid her in an attic. That’s what the kids in the woods said. Her mom and dad left for California, and she stayed behind with her grandmother. Then the grandmother died. Elvira ran away. She got caught on the street. She was raped, I think, more than once.” He cleared his throat and his cheeks were dark with angry blood. “She had the start of this cold or whatever it is, so she couldn’t fever-scent and make them stop. Fred found her two days after he found me. He took some pictures. He keeps us here until he has enough to get a good bounty.”

“One million dollars a head,” Kevin said. “Dead or alive.”

“Don’t be dramatic,” Will said. “I don’t know how much he gets, and they don’t pay if we’re dead. If we’re injured, he could even go to jail. That’s what I heard in the woods. The bounty is federal not state, so he tries to avoid the troopers.”

Stella was impressed by this show of knowledge. “It’s awful,” she said, her heart thumping. “I want to go home.”

“How did Fred catch you?” Will asked.

“I went for a walk,” Stella said.

“You ran away from home,” Will said. “Do your parents care?”

Stella thought of Kaye waking up to find her gone and wanted to cry. That made her nose hurt more, and her ears started to ache.

The wire mesh door rattled. Will pointed, and Kevin left to see what was going on. Stella glanced at Will and then followed Kevin. Mother Trinket was at the cage door. She had just finished shoving a cafeteria tray under the mesh frame. The tray held a paper plate covered with fried chicken backs and necks, a small scoop of dry potato salad, and several long spears of limp broccoli. The old woman watched them, eyes milky, chin withdrawn, strong mottled arms hanging like two birch logs.

“Yuck,” Kevin said, and picked up the tray. He gave it to Stella. “All yours,” he said.

“How’s the girl?” Mother Trinket asked.

“She’s really sick,” Kevin said.

“People coming. They’ll take care of her,” Mother Trinket said.

“What do you care?” Kevin asked.

The old woman blinked. “It’s my son,” she said, then turned and waddled through the door. She closed and locked it behind her.

The girl, Free Shape, was breathing in short, thick gasps as they carried Stella’s tray into the back room.

“She smells bad,” Mabel said. “I’m scared for her.”

“So am I,” Will said.

“Will is Papa here,” Mabel said. “Will should get help.”

Will looked miserably at Stella and fell back on the couch. Stella put the tray on a small folding table. She did not feel like eating. Both she and Kevin squatted by Elvira. Stella stroked the girl’s cheeks, making her freckles pale. They remained pale. The patches had steadied in the last few minutes, and were now even more meaningless and vague.

“Can we make her feel better?” Stella asked.

“We’re not angels,” Will said.

“My mother says we all have minds deep inside of us,” Stella said, desperate to find some answer. “Minds that talk to each other through chemicals and—”

“What the hell does she know?” Will asked sharply. “She’s human, right?”

“She’s Kaye Lang Rafelson,” Stella said, stung and defensive.

“I don’t care who she is,” Will said. “They hate us because we’re new and better.”

“Our parents don’t hate us,” Stella ventured hopefully, looking at Mabel and Kevin.

“Mine do,” Mabel said. “My father hates the government so he hid me, but he just took off one day. My mother left me in the bus station.”

Stella could see that these children had lived lives different from her own. They all smelled lonely and left out, like puppies pulled from a litter, whining and searching for something they had lost. Beneath the loneliness and other emotions of the moment lay their fundamentals: Will smelled rich and sharp like aged cheddar. Kevin smelled a little sweet. Mabel smelled like soapy bathwater, steam and flowers and clean, warm skin.

She could not detect Elvira’s fundamental. Underneath the illness she seemed to have no smell at all.

“We thought about escaping,” Kevin said. “There’s steel wire in all the walls. Fred told us he made this place strong.”

“He hates us,” Will said.

“We’re worth money,” Kevin said.

“He told me his daughter killed his wife,” Will said.

That kept them all quiet for a while, all but Free Shape, whose breath rasped.

“Teach me how to talk with my dapples,” Stella asked Will. She wanted to take their minds off the things they could not hope to do, like escape.

“What if Elvira dies?” Will asked, his forehead going pale.

“We’ll cry for her,” Mabel said.

“Right,” Kevin said. “We’ll make a little cross.”

“I’m not a Christian,” Will said.

“I am,” Mabel said. “Christ was one of us. I heard it in the woods. That’s why they killed him.”

Will shook his head sadly at this naÏveté. Stella felt ashamed at the words she had spoken to the men in the Texaco minimart. She knew she was nothing like Jesus. Deep inside, she did not feel merciful and charitable. She had never admitted that before, but watching Elvira gasping on the floor taught her what her emotions really were.

She hated Fred Trinket and his mother. She hated the federals coming for them.

“We’ll have to fight to get out,” Will said. “Fred is careful. He doesn’t come inside the cage. He won’t even call a doctor. He just calls for the vans. The vans come from Maryland and Richmond. Everyone wears suits and carries cattle prods and tranquilizer guns.”

Stella shivered. She had called her parents; her parents were coming. They might be captured, too.

“Sometimes when the vans come, the children die, maybe by accident, but they’re still dead,” Will continued. “They burn the bodies. That’s what we heard in the woods.” He added, “I don’t feel like teaching you how to freckle.”

“Then tell me about the woods,” Stella said.

“The woods are free,” Will said. “I wish the whole world was woods.”

19

The rain came back as drizzle. Kaye pulled off and parked just north of the private asphalt road that led to the big, white-pillared brick house and outbuildings. The sky was dark enough that the occupants of the house had turned on the interior lights. The black steel mailbox, mounted on a chest-high brick base, showed five gold reflective numbers.

“This is it,” Mitch said. He peered through the wet windshield and rolled down his window. A red pickup and camper had been parked in front. There were no other vehicles.

“Maybe we’re too late,” Kaye said, fighting back tears.

“It’s only been ten or fifteen minutes.”

“It took us twenty minutes. The sheriff might have come and gone.”

Mitch quietly opened the door. “If I can grab her, I’ll come right back.”

“No,” Kaye said. “I won’t be left alone. I don’t think I can stand it.” Her fingers gripped the steering wheel like cords of rope.

“Stay here, please,” Mitch said. “I’ll be okay. I can carry her. You can’t.”

“You’d be surprised,” Kaye said. Then, “Why would you have to carry her?”

“For speed,” Mitch said. “For speed, that’s all.”

He opened the glove box and took out a cloth-wrapped bundle, pulled open the cloth, smelling of lubricant, and removed a pistol. He tucked the gun into his suit coat pocket. They had three handguns, all of them unregistered and illegal. Getting charged with gun possession was the last thing Mitch and Kaye lost sleep over. Nevertheless, they both looked on the guns with loathing, knowing that weapons give a false sense of security.

Mitch had cleaned and oiled all three last week.

He took a deep breath and stepped out, walking to the rear of the truck. Kaye released the brake and put the truck into neutral. Mitch pushed, grunting softly in the drizzle. Kaye stepped down and helped, steering with one hand, and together they rolled the truck up the asphalt road, stopping about halfway to the house. Kaye spun the wheel and turned the truck until it blocked the way. Hedges and brick walls lined the drive, and no vehicle would be able to get around the truck going in or out. She sat in the cab. Mitch took her face in his hands and kissed her cheek and she squeezed his arms. Then he walked toward the house, shoving his hands into the pockets of his slacks. He never looked comfortable in a suit. His shoulders and his hands were too big, his neck too long. He did not have the face for a suit.

Kaye watched with heart pounding, her mind a thicket.

The pillars and porch stood dark, the door closed. Mitch walked up the steps as softly as his hard-soled shoes allowed and peered through the tall, narrow window on the right.

Kaye watched him turn without knocking and descend the steps. He walked around the side of the house, out of sight. She started to sob and jammed her knuckles against her teeth and lips. They had been standing on tiptoes for eleven years. It was cruel, and whenever she felt she was used to the extremes of their life together, as she had this morning, almost, so close to feeling normal and productive and contented, working on her scientific paper, napping in front of her computer, she would come up short with some spontaneous vision of how they could lose it all. They had been lucky, she knew.

But rarely did her worst visions meet the level of this nightmare.

Mitch walked along the neatly trimmed grass margin, crouching below the windows along the side of the house. He heard a rasping, flacketing buzz, like a big insect, and glanced up with a scowl into the stormy gloom. Saw nothing.

His heart almost stopped when he realized the cell phone was still on. He reached into his left pocket and switched it off.

A gravel path reached from the back porch out to a long frame outbuilding behind the house. He avoided the path and the scrunching sound his shoes would make there, and walked along the soft margin, stepping from the grass, patchy and dead, onto the outbuilding’s concrete stoop. He peered through the small, square window set into the steel door. Why a steel door? And new, at that.

In the room beyond the small window he saw a heavy mesh gate. He quietly tried the doorknob. It was locked, of course. He stepped backward, dropped his heel in a depression in the grass, caught his balance with a hop, then walked around the side, quickening his pace. The sheriff might arrive any second. Mitch preferred recovering Stella without official help. Besides, he knew Kaye could not hold out much longer. He had to finish his reconnaissance in a hurry, locate his daughter, and decide what to do next.

Mitch had never been one to make quick decisions. He had spent too many years patiently scraping and brushing through packed layers of soil, uncovering millennia of silent, unwritten history. The peace that had filled his soul on those digs had turned out not to be a survival trait.

He had thrown that peace away, along with the digging, the history, and almost all of his past life, and replaced it with a desperate and protective fury.

20

LEESBURG

Mark Augustine twitched his lips at the arrival of the man and the woman in the old truck. Little Bird gave them a series of clear, frozen pictures, at the ends of blurry swoops, the pictures cameoed on the big screens in blue-wrapped squares.

Two names came up on the last screen. Facial matching had led to an identification that Augustine did not need. The man walking around the house was Mitch Rafelson. The woman in the truck was Kaye Lang Rafelson.

“Good,” Browning said. “The gang’s all here.” She looked up at Augustine.

Augustine pinched his lips. “Enforcement is hardly an exact science,” he said. “Where are the vans?”

“About two minutes away,” Browning said. Once more, she was completely in control and confident.

21

SPOTSYLVANIA COUNTY

Kaye heard engines. She looked over the hedge to the road and saw two blue-and-white Virginia State Police patrol cars coming from one direction and from the other, no sirens or flashing lights, a long, blocky white utility van, like a cross between a prison bus and an ambulance. She could not see Emergency Action’s red-and-gold shield on the side, but she knew it was there.

She stood quietly as the patrol cars slowed and then nosed off with the van to see who would turn first into the private road.

“No snooping,” the old woman said. “You with the gas company?” The woman was forty feet away, nothing more than a frizz-headed silhouette. She had come out of the house very quietly as Mitch had transited the back of the long building. She was carrying a shotgun.

Mitch turned and looked up the right side of the long building, facing the back of the house. He had made his circuit and found no other entrance.

“Don’t be silly,” he called, trying to sound amiable. “I’m looking for my daughter.”

“We don’t have parties,” the woman said.

“Mother!” A man slammed open the screen door and stood beside her on the back porch. “Put that damned gun away. There are troopers out front.”

“Caught him,” the woman said. She pointed.

“Come right on up here. Let me see you. You with the troopers?”

“Emergency Action,” Mitch said.

“That’s not what he said,” the woman commented, lowering the shotgun.

The man took the gun away from her with a jerk and stepped back into the house. The woman stood staring at Mitch. “You come to get your daughter,” she murmured.

Mitch walked warily around her, then to the left, seeing the headlights of a car and a van at the end of the road behind their old truck.

“Damn it, you’ve parked all wrong,” the man shouted from inside the house. Mitch heard feet stamping on wooden floors, saw lights go on and off through the rooms, heard the door open on the front porch.

As Mitch came around the corner, a plump, active man in shorts stood on the porch between the pillars, hands up as if surrendering. “What are they up to?” the man muttered.

Mitch’s hopes were very low. He could not find Stella without making a lot of noise, and there was no way now he could imagine getting her away from the house even if he carried her. The woods behind the house and across a field looked thick. Bugs were humming and chirping all around him now that the rain had let up. The air smelled dusty and sweet with moisture and wet grass and dirt.

Kaye faced the main road and the newly arrived vehicles. Two men in two-tone gray uniforms got out of the patrol cars and walked toward her. The younger man cast a confused backward glance at the van.

“Did you call us, ma’am?” the older trooper asked. He was large, in his late forties, with a deep but crackling bull voice.

“Our daughter’s been kidnapped. She’s in there,” Kaye said.

“In the house?”

“We just got here. She called us and told us where to find her.”

The troopers regarded each other briefly, faces professionally blank, then turned toward the two figures emerging from the van: a tall, cadaverous male in a shiny black jumpsuit and a stocky female in plastic isolation whites. They slipped on gloves and face masks and approached the troopers.

“This is our jurisdiction, officers,” the thin man said. “We’re federal.”

“We have a kidnapping complaint,” the older trooper said.

“Ma’am, what’s your business here?” the woman asked Kaye.

“Show me your ID,” Kaye demanded.

“Look at the damned van. They aren’t cheap, you know,” said the thin man in the black jumpsuit, his voice haughty. “You the mother?”

The troopers stood back. The big one scowled at the thin man.

“You are here to pay bounty,” Kaye said, her voice scratchy. “I have no idea how many kids are here, but I know this is not legal. Not in this state.”

The big trooper stood his ground with arms folded. “That true?” he asked the woman in the plastic suit.

“We have jurisdiction. This is federal,” the tall man repeated. “Sherry,” he called out to his partner, “get the office.”

“Maryland plates,” the younger trooper observed.

Kaye studied the big trooper’s face. He was red-cheeked and his nose was a swollen network of broken veins, probably from rosacea, but it could also have been drink.

“Why are you outside of your county?” the big trooper asked the pair from the van.

“It’s federal; it’s official,” the stout little woman said defiantly. “You can’t stop us.”

“Take off that damned mask. I can’t understand you,” the big trooper said.

“It’s policy to leave the mask on, officer,” the woman announced formally. Her outfit rustled and squeaked as she walked. There was an air of disarray about the team that did not inspire confidence. The big trooper’s uniform was pressed and fit tightly over a strong frame going to fat. He looked sad and tired, but strong on self-discipline. Kaye thought he looked like an old football player. He was not impressed. He turned his attention back to Kaye. “Who called the state police, ma’am?”

“My husband. Someone snatched our daughter. She’s in that house.”

“Are we talkin’ about virus children?” the trooper asked softly.

Kaye studied his expression, his dark eyes, the lines around his jowls. “Yes,” she said.

“How long you been living here?” the big trooper asked.

“In Spotsylvania County, almost four years,” Kaye said.

“Hiding out?”

“Living quietly.”

“Yeah,” the trooper said with somber resignation. “I hear that.” He swung around to the Emergency Action team. “You got paperwork?” He waved his hand at his partner. “Check out the house.”

“My husband is armed,” Kaye said, and pointed toward the house. “They kidnapped our child. Please, he won’t shoot at you. Let him surrender his gun.”

The big trooper unclipped his pistol with a swift motion of both hands. He squinted at the big pillared house, then saw Mitch and the old woman walking up the side yard.

His partner, younger by at least ten years, stooped and immediately drew his own pistol. “I hate this shit,” he said.

“Let us do our work,” the stout woman demanded. The mask slipped and she looked even more ridiculous.

“I haven’t seen any paperwork, and you are out of your jurisdiction,” the big trooper growled, keeping his eyes on the house. “I need to see EMAC documents authorizing this extraction.”

Neither responded at once. “We’re filling in for the Spotsylvania County team. They’re on another assignment,” the thin man admitted, some of his bravado gone.

“I know the ones,” the big trooper said. He looked sadly at Kaye. “They took my son four years ago. My wife and I haven’t seen our boy once, not once, since then. He is in Indiana now, outside Terre Haute.”

“You’re brave to still be together,” Kaye said, as if a spark had passed and they understood each other and their troubles.

The big trooper dropped his chin but still watched everyone with beady, alert eyes. “Don’t you know it,” he said. He waved his hand at his partner. “William, retrieve the father’s little pistol and let’s check the house. Let’s see what you all have got going here.”

Mitch slung his gun by its trigger guard on his pointing finger and held it high up in the air. He regretted carrying it at all now; he felt foolish, like an actor in a cop show. Still, the thought that Stella was inside the house or the long building or somewhere else on the property made him feel volatile and dangerous. Anything might provoke him, and that was frightening. The intensity of his devotion was like a blowtorch in his head, brilliant and blinding.

It had always been that way. There would never be any escape.

The younger trooper slogged across the wet grass in his boots.

The plump man in shorts finally decided to speak. “How can I help, officer?” he asked.

The younger trooper took Mitch’s gun and backed away. “Are you holding children on these premises?” he asked the man in shorts.

“We are,” the man said. “Strays and runaways. We protect them until the truck comes and takes them to where they can be taken care of. Where they belong.”

Mitch looked at the trooper from beneath lowered, bushy brows. He had always possessed what amounted to a single eyebrow over his eyes and with age, the woolly caterpillar of hair had thickened and gone wild. At the best of times, he looked formidable, even a little crazy. “Our daughter is not a runaway,” he said. “She was kidnapped.”

The big trooper approached with Kaye and the two collectors close behind. “Where are the children?” he asked.

“Round back,” said the man in shorts. “Sir, my name is Fred Trinket. I’m a longtime resident, and my mother has lived here all her life.”

“To hell with that,” the big trooper said. “Show us the kids, now.”

Something whickered over their heads like a big insect. They all looked up.

“Damn,” the younger trooper said, flinching and dropping his shoulders. “Sounds like federal surveillance.”

The big trooper drew himself up and circled his eyes warily around the dark skies. “I do not see a thing,” he said. “Let’s go.”

22

LEESBURG

The arrival of the troopers did not please Rachel Browning.

“I think we should alert the Frederick County office,” she said. She blew her nose again. “And let’s get the state’s attorney general in on this. She’ll want to know what her people are up to.”

“There won’t be time,” Augustine said. “It’s Virginia, Rachel. They don’t like the feds telling them what to do. And the situation is highly irregular, even for an official kidnapping.”

Browning tilted her head to one side, jerking her gaze between Augustine and the displays. “I didn’t hear what the big guy said.” The Little Bird had backed off about fifty feet and was hovering. Its little fuel cell would be depleted soon, and it would have to return or be retrieved by the command vehicle.

“The trooper said his son was taken,” Augustine told her. “He is not likely to be sympathetic.”

“Shit,” Browning said. “You’re happy about this, aren’t you?”

Augustine did not smile, but his lips twitched.

“I will not take responsibility,” Browning insisted.

“Your own machines are recording everything,” Augustine said, pointing at the console. “Better whisk Little Bird out of there, and quickly, if you want to escape a district court spanking.”

“You’re as culpable as I am,” Browning said.

“I’ve never authorized bounty,” Augustine reminded her. “That’s your division.”

The phone on the desk wheedled.

“Whoops,” Augustine said. “Someone’s been tuning in.”

Browning answered. She covered the mouthpiece and looked up desperately at Augustine. “It’s the surgeon general,” she said, eyes wide.

Augustine expressed his sympathy with a lift of his brows and a sigh. Then he turned and walked toward the door. The rubber tip of his cane made squeaking noises on the hard floor.

23

SPOTSYLVANIA COUNTY

Fred Trinket gently pushed his mother aside as he led the group around the right side of the house. Mitch hated this place, the plump man in khaki shorts, the collectors. His head was like a balloon filled with gasoline waiting to be torched off.

Kaye felt his anger like heat from a stove. She gripped his arm. If Stella was harmed, in any way, then… If their daughter was harmed, then…

She could not finish that sequence of thoughts.

“We’ve fed the runaways a chicken lunch, very nutritious,” Trinket explained. His face was like blotchy marble and he was sweating like a stuck pig. He was beginning to realize the big trooper did not like the way Trinket made money.

Mitch made a jerk in Trinket’s direction. Kaye drew him back and squeezed his arm until he winced. He did not object, just looked at the gray, square board face of the long building behind the house, the asphalt shingled roof, the steel door with its tiny window and concrete stoop.

“We keep good, clean facilities,” Trinket said. He had moved ahead of Mitch and Kaye and flanked the big trooper. The younger trooper and the collectors took up the rear. “We’ve had a number of runaways through here,” Trinket continued, louder now with the distance to the door decreasing, his secret soon to be revealed. “We’re a conscientious clearing house. We take good care of them.”

“Shut up,” Kaye demanded.

“Keep your temper, ma’am, please,” the big trooper requested, but his own voice was shaky.

Stella heard the lock in the big steel door and rushed from Elvira’s side down the hall to the inner cage gate. She stood there as the lights came on in the first little room, with the boxes, and saw a big man in a leather jacket and a khaki uniform and behind him, Fred Trinket.

Stella smelled Kaye and Mitch almost immediately.

“Mommy,” she said, as if she were three years old again.

“Open that door,” the big trooper ordered Trinket. There were tears on the trooper’s cheeks. Stella had not seen many police officers in her life, and she had certainly never seen one cry.

Trinket mumbled and drew the brass key on its string.

“Mommy, she’s dead!” Stella cried. “She just died, just right now/ We couldn’t do anything!” Her voice split and she spoke in two high-pitched, singing, weirdly beautiful streams, as if two young girls stood by the mesh gate, one inside the other. Kaye could not understand, but her heart almost exploded with joy and grief.

“Open it now!” Kaye shouted, pushing through. Her fingernails raked Fred Trinket’s cheek. He recoiled, dropped the key and squealed in protest.

Kaye tried to reach Stella through the mesh. The distance between the two doors separated them.

“Lord almighty,” the younger trooper said. Mitch scooped up Trinket’s key and tossed it to Kaye, then grabbed the man and held him. The big trooper stood back. Kaye opened the mesh gate and then the inner gate and grabbed Stella.

“Get the others,” Stella said.

“How many?” the big trooper asked Trinket.

“Five,” Trinket said.

“Sir, it’s our duty to assemble and transport all virus children,” the stocky collector asserted, shouldering into the first room. Her tall, thin colleague remained outside, staring at the ground, the steps, anything but what was happening within the long building.

Kaye, Mitch, and the big trooper walked down the hall. Stella followed her mother closely. Mitch gave his daughter a squeeze around the shoulders and she hugged him close. “I’m sorry,” she whispered.

Mabel and Kevin sat on the couch. Will stood by Elvira. The television blared an old episode of I Love Lucy. Kaye bent beside the prone girl and examined her, face wrinkling in pity. She saw the bloody crust under the girl’s nose, turned her head gently, found more crust behind her ears, felt the lumps under her jaw and in her armpits.

“How long?” Kaye asked Stella.

“Five, six minutes,” Stella said. “She just coughed real bad and lay still.”

Kaye looked over her shoulder at Mitch and the big trooper. Trinket winced but wisely kept quiet.

“Let me see,” the stocky collector said. She knelt briefly beside the girl. Then she pushed to her feet with a whuff of air and a sharp look at the others and stumbled hastily back down the hall.

“Is she sick?” Trinket asked. “Can you help her?”

“What the hell do you care?” the big trooper asked.

Kaye heard the collector calling for the first aid kit. “It’s too late,” she murmured.

“You a doctor?” the big trooper asked, bending low over Kaye and the girl on the floor.

“Close enough,” Kaye said.

“Get your daughter out of here,” he said.

“I might help,” Kaye suggested, looking up at the big trooper’s jowls, his intense blue eyes.

Mitch let go of Trinket and pulled Stella close.

“Just get her out of here,” the trooper repeated. “We’ll take care of this. Go far away. Stay together.”

“Can Will and Kevin and Mabel come?” Stella asked.

Will regarded them all with slit-eyed defiance. Kevin and Mabel focused on the television, their cheeks gold and pink with fear and shame.

“I’m sorry,” Kaye said.

“Mother…”

“We have to travel light and fast,” Kaye said. And they might all be sick.

Stella pulled loose from Mitch and ran to Will. She grabbed Will’s shoulders and they stared at each other for several seconds.

Kaye and Mitch watched them, Mitch twitching, Kaye oddly calm and fascinated. She hadn’t seen her daughter with another Homo sapiens novus in two years. She was ashamed it had been so long, but ashamed for whom, she could not say. Maybe for the whole troubled human race.

The two separated. Kaye took Stella by the hand and gave her the secret signal that she had taught her daughter years ago, a scrape of her pointing finger across Stella’s palm that meant they had to go now, no questions, no hesitation. Stella jerked but followed.

“Remember the woods,” Will sang out. “Woods everywhere. Woods for the whole world.”

As they ran down the asphalt road to the truck, they heard the trooper arguing with Trinket and the collectors. “We don’t take kindly to child theft, not in this county.”

He was buying Stella and her parents time.

So was the dead girl.

Mitch drove around the van. The hedge scraped Kaye’s door. “We should take them with us, all of them!” she cried, and hugged Stella fiercely. “God, Mitch, we should save them all.”

Mitch did not stop.

24

WASHINGTON, D.C., OHIO

At Dulles, Augustine’s limo was flagged through and driven directly to the waiting government jet, its engines idling on the tarmac. As he boarded, an Air Force staff officer handed him a locked attaché case. Augustine asked the attendant for a ginger ale then took his seat midplane, over the wing, and buckled himself in.

He removed an e-sheet from the attaché case and folded the red corner to activate it. A keypad appeared in the lower half. He entered the code of the day and read his briefing from the Emergency Action Special Reconnaissance Office. Interdictions were up 10 percent in the last month, due in large part to Rachel Browning’s efforts.

Augustine could no longer bear to watch TV or listen to the radio. So many loud voices shouting lies for their own advantage. America and much of the rest of the world had entered a peculiar state of pathology, outwardly normal, inwardly prone to extraordinary fear and anger: a kind of powder keg madness.

Augustine knew he could take responsibility for a considerable share of that madness. He had once fanned the flames of fear himself, hoping to rise in the ranks to director of the National Institutes of Health and procure more funds from a reluctant Congress.

Instead, the president’s select committee on Herod’s issues had promoted him laterally to become czar of SHEVA, in charge of more than 120 schools around the country.

Parent opposition groups called him the commandant, or Colonel Klink.

Those were the kind names.

He finished reading, then crimped the corner of the e-paper until it broke, automatically erasing the memory strip. The display side of the paper turned orange. He handed the attendant the scrap and received his ginger ale in exchange.

“Takeoff in six minutes, sir,” the attendant said.

“Am I traveling alone?” Augustine asked, looking around the back of his seat.

“Yes, sir,” the attendant said.

Augustine smiled, but there was no joy in it. His face was lined and gray. His hair had turned almost white in the past five years. He looked twenty years older than his chronological age of fifty-nine.

He peered through the window at the welcome storm blowing in fits and starts over most of Virginia and Maryland. Tomorrow was going to be dry once again and mercilessly sunny with a high of ninety-three. It would be warm when he gave his little propaganda speech in Lexington.

The South and East were in the fourth year of a dry spell. Kentucky was no longer a state of blue grass. Much of it looked like California at the end of a parched summer. Some called it punishment, though there had been record corn and wheat crops.

Jay Leno had once cracked that SHEVA had pushed global warming onto a back burner.

Augustine fidgeted with the clasp on the attaché case. The plane taxied. With nothing but raindrop-blurred runway visible outside the window, he pulled out the paper edition of the Washington Post. That and the Cleveland Plain Dealer were the only two true newspapers he read now. Most of the other dailies around the country had succumbed to the deep recession. Even the New York Times was published only in an electronic edition.

Some wags called the online journals “electrons.” Whereas paper had two sides, electrons were biased toward the negative. The online journals certainly had nothing good to say about Emergency Action.

“Mea maxima culpa,” Augustine whispered, his nervous little prayer of contrition. Infrequently, that mantra of guilt changed places with another voice that insisted it was time to die, to put himself at the mercy of a just God.

But Augustine had practiced medicine, studied disease, and struggled in politics too long to believe in a kind or generous deity. And he did not want to believe in the other.

The one that would be most interested in Mark Augustine’s soul.

The plane reached the end of the runway and ascended quickly, efficiently, on the wind from a rich bass roar.

The attendant touched his shoulder and smiled down on him. Augustine had somehow managed a catnap of perhaps ten minutes, a blessing. He felt almost at peace. The plane was at altitude, flying level. “Dr. Augustine, something’s come up. We have orders to take you back to Washington. There’s a secure satellite channel open for you.”

Augustine took the handheld and listened. His face became, if that was possible, even more ashen. A few minutes later, he returned the phone to the attendant and left his seat to walk gingerly down the aisle to the washroom. There, he urinated, bracing the top of his head and one hand against the curved bulkhead. The plane was banking to make a turn.

He was scheduled for an emergency meeting with the secretary of Health and Human Services, his immediate superior, and representatives from the Centers for Disease Control.

He pushed the little flush button, zipped up, washed his hands thoroughly, rinsed his gray, surprisingly corpselike face, and stared at himself in the narrow mirror. A little turbulence made the jet bounce.

The mirror always showed someone other than the man he had wanted to become. The last thing Mark Augustine had ever imagined he would be doing was running a network of concentration camps. Despite the educational amenities and the lack of death houses, that was precisely what the schools were: isolated camps used to park a generation of children at high expense, with no in and out privileges.

No peace. No respite. Only test after test after cruel test for everyone on the planet.

25

SPOTSYLVANIA COUNTY

Stella watched her parents strip the house. She wept silently.

Kaye dragged a wooden box stacked high with the computer and the most important of their books and papers out to the Dodge. Mitch burned documents in a rusty oil drum in the backyard.

Kaye tersely told Stella to throw the clothes she really wanted into a single small suitcase and anything else into a plastic garbage bag, which they would take if there was room left in the car.

“I didn’t mean to do this,” Stella said softly. Kaye did not hear or, more likely, did not think it best to listen to her daughter now. Louder, Stella added, “I like this house.”

“So do I, honey. So do I,” Kaye said, her face stony.

In the kitchen, Mitch smashed the cell phone and pulled out the little plastic circuit boards, then jammed them in his pocket. He would throw them out the window or drop them in a garbage can in another state. He then smashed the answering machine.

“Don’t bother,” Kaye said as she lugged the plastic bag full of clothes down the hall. “We’re probably the most listened-to family in America.”

“Old habit,” Mitch said. “Leave me to my illusions.”

“I’ve made trouble and I’m putting you in danger,” Stella said. “I should just go away. I should just go into a camp.”

“Us, in danger?” Kaye stopped and spun around at the end of the hall. “Are you testing me?” she demanded. “We are not worried for ourselves, Stella. We have never been worried about ourselves.” Her hands moved in small arcs from hips to shoulders, and then she crossed her arms.

“I don’t understand why this has to happen,” Stella said. “Please, let’s stay here and if they come, they come, all right?”

Kaye’s face turned white.

Stella could not stop talking. “You say you’re afraid for me, but are you really afraid for yourselves, for how you’ll feel if—”

“Shut up, Stella,” Kaye said, shaking, then regretted the sharp words. “Please. We have to get out of here quickly.”

“I’d know others like me. I could find out what we really need to do. They have to accept us someday.”

“They could just as easily kill you all,” Mitch said, standing behind Kaye.

“That’s crazy,” Stella said. “Their own children?”

Mitch and Kaye faced off against their daughter down the length of the hall. Kaye seemed to recognize this symbolism and turned halfway, not looking directly at Stella, but at the plasterboard, the cornice, the paint, her eyes searching these blank things as if they might be sacred texts.

“I don’t think they would,” Stella said.

“That is not your concern,” Mitch said.

Stella desperately wrinkled her face in what she hoped was a smile. Her tears started to flow. “If it isn’t my concern, whose is it?”

“Not yours, alone, not yet,” Mitch said, his voice many degrees softer, and so full of painful, angry love that Stella’s throat itched. She scratched her neck with her fingers.

Kaye looked up. “Damn,” she said, reminded of something. She stared at her fingers and her nails and rushed into the bathroom. There, she lathered and rinsed her hands for several minutes.

Steam billowed from the sink as Stella stood by the door.

“Fred stuff?” Stella asked.

“Fred,” Kaye confirmed grimly.

“You took a good swipe,” Stella said.

“Mom cat,” Kaye said. She scrubbed back and forth with a stiff little bristle brush, then looked up at the ceiling through the steam and the lavender of the soap. “I’m going to wash that man right off of my hands,” she sang. This was so close to the edge, so fraught, that Stella forgot her guilt and frustration and reached out for her mother.

Kaye knocked aside her daughter’s long arms.

“Mother,” Stella said, shocked. “I’m sorry!” She reached out again. Kaye let out a wail, slapping at Stella’s hands until Stella caught her around her chest. As mother and daughter slumped to the ragged throw rug on the bathroom floor, too exhausted to do anything but shake and clutch, Mitch sucked in his breath and finished the work. He loaded a second suitcase with clothes, zipped it shut, and tossed it into the trunk of the Dodge along with the garbage bag. He imagined himself a rugged frontier father getting ready to pull out of the sod house and hightail it into the woods because Indians were coming.

But it wasn’t Indians. They had spent time with Indians—Stella had been born in a reservation hospital in Washington state. Mitch had studied and admired Indians for decades. He had also dug up ancient North American bones. That had been a long time ago. He didn’t think he would do that now.

Mitch was no longer a white man. He wanted little or nothing to do with his own race, his own species.

It was the cavalry that he feared.

They took the Dodge and left the old gray Toyota truck in the dirt driveway. Kaye did not look back at the house, but Stella, sitting beside her mother in the backseat, swung around.

“We buried Shamus there,” she said. Shamus had come into their lives three years ago, an old, battered tomcat with a rope looped around his neck. Kaye had cut off the rope, sewn up a slashed ear, and put in a shunt to drain a pus-filled wound behind one eye. To keep the orange tabby from scratching out the stitches, Mitch had wrapped his head in a ridiculous plastic shield that had made him look, Stella said, like Frankenpuss.

For a half-wild old tom, he had been a remarkably sweet and affectionate cat.

One evening last winter, Shamus had not shown up for table scraps or his usual siesta on Kaye’s lap. The tom had wandered off into the far corner of the backyard, well away from Stella’s sense of smell. He had pushed his way under a swelling lobe of kudzu, hidden from crows, and curled up.

Two days later, acting on a hunch, Mitch had found him there, head down, eyes closed, feet tucked under as if asleep. They had buried him a few yards away wrapped in a scrap of knitted afghan he had favored as a bed.

Mitch had said that cats did that, wandered off when they knew the end was near so their bodies would not attract predators or bring disease to the family, the pride.

“Poor Shamus,” Stella said, peering out the rear window. “He has no family now.”

26

They drove. Stella remembered many such trips. She lay in the backseat, nose burning, arms folded tightly, fingers and toes itching, her head in Kaye’s lap and when Kaye drove, in Mitch’s.

Mitch stroked her hair and looked down on her. Sometimes she slept. For a time, the clouds and then the sun through the car windows filled her up. Thoughts ran around in her head like mice. Even with her parents, she hated to admit, she was alone. She hated those thoughts. She thought instead of Will and Kevin and Mabel or Maybelle and how they had suffered because their parents were stupid or mean or both.

The car stopped at a service station. Late afternoon sun reflected from a shiny steel sign and hurt Stella’s eyes as she pushed through the hollow metal door into the restroom. The restroom was small and empty and forbidding, the walls covered with chipped, dirty tile. She threw up in the toilet and wiped her face and mouth.

Now the backs of her ears stung as if little bees were poking her. In the mirror, she saw that her cheeks would not make colors. They were as pale as Kaye’s. Stella wondered if she was changing, becoming more like her mother. Maybe being a virus child was something you got over, like a birthmark that faded away.

Kaye felt her daughter’s forehead as Mitch drove.

The sun had set and the storm had passed.

Stella lay in Kaye’s lap, face almost buried. She was breathing heavily. “Roll over, sweetie,” Kaye said. Stella rolled over. “Your face is hot.”

“I threw up back there,” Stella said.

“How far to the next house?” Kaye asked Mitch.

“The map says twenty miles. We’ll be in Pittsburgh soon.”

“I think she’s sick,” Kaye said.

“It isn’t Shiver, is it, Kaye?” Stella asked.

“You don’t get Shiver, honey.”

“Everything hurts. Is it mumps?”

“You’ve had shots for everything.” But Kaye knew that couldn’t possibly be true. Nobody knew what susceptibilities the new children might have. Stella had never been sick, not with colds or flu; she had never even had a bacterial infection. Kaye had thought the new children might have improved immune systems. Mitch had not supported this theory, however, and they had given Stella all the proper immunizations, one by one, after the FDA and the CDC had grudgingly approved the old vaccines for the new children.

“An aspirin might help,” Stella said.

“An aspirin would make you ill,” Kaye said. “You know that.”

“Tylenol,” Stella added, swallowing.

Kaye poured her some water from a bottle and lifted her head for a drink. “That’s bad, too,” Kaye murmured. “You are very special, honey.”

She pulled back Stella’s eyelids, one at a time. The irises were bland, the little gold flecks clouded. Stella’s pupils were like pinpricks. Her daughter’s eyes were as expressionless as her cheeks. “So fast,” Kaye said. She set Stella down into a pillow in the corner of the backseat and leaned forward to whisper into Mitch’s ear. “It could be what the dead girl had.”

“Shit,” Mitch said.

“It isn’t respiratory, not yet, but she’s hot. Maybe a hundred and four, a hundred and five. I can’t find the thermometer in the first aid kit.”

“I put it there,” Mitch said.

“I can’t find it. We’ll get one in Pittsburgh.”

“A doctor,” Mitch said.

“At the safe house,” Kaye said. “We need a specialist.” She was working to stay calm. She had never seen her daughter with a fever, her cheeks and eyes so bland.

The car sped up.

“Keep to the speed limit,” Kaye said.

“No guarantees,” Mitch said.

27

OHIO

Christopher Dicken got off the C-141 transport at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base. At Augustine’s suggestion, he had hitched a late-afternoon ride from Baltimore with a flight of National Guard troops being moved into Dayton.

He was met on the concrete apron by a neatly dressed middle-aged man in a gray suit, the civilian liaison, who accompanied him through a small, austere passenger terminal to a black Chevrolet staff car.

Dicken looked at two unmarked brown Fords behind the Chevrolet. “Why the escort?” he asked.

“Secret Service,” the liaison said.

“Not for me, I hope,” Dicken said.

“No, sir.”

As they approached the Chevrolet, a much younger driver in a black suit snapped to military attention, introduced himself as Officer Reed of Ohio Special Needs School Security, and opened the car’s right rear door.

Mark Augustine sat in the backseat.

“Good afternoon, Christopher,” he said. “I hope your flight was pleasant.”

“Not very,” Dicken said. He hunched awkwardly into the staff car and sat on the black leather. The car drove off the base, trailed by the two Fords. Dicken stared at huge billows of clouds piling up over the green hills and suburbs beside the wide gray turnpike. He was glad to be on the ground again. Changes in air pressure bothered his leg.

“How’s the leg?” Augustine asked.

“Okay,” Dicken said.

“Mine’s giving me hell,” Augustine said. “I flew in from Dulles. Flight got bumpy over Pennsylvania.”

“You broke your leg?”

“In a bathtub.”

Dicken conspicuously rotated his torso to face his former boss and looked him over coldly. “Sorry to hear that.”

Augustine met his gaze with tired eyes. “Thank you for coming.”

“I didn’t come at your request,” Dicken said.

“I know. But the person who made the request talked to me.”

“It was an order from HHS.”

“Exactly,” Augustine said, and tapped the armrest on the door. “We’re having a problem at some of our schools.”

“They are not my schools,” Dicken said.

“Have we made clear how much of a pariah I am?” Augustine asked.

“Not nearly clear enough,” Dicken said.

“I know your sympathies, Christopher.”

“I don’t think you do.”

“How’s Mrs. Rhine?”

The goddamned high point of Mark Augustine’s career, Dicken thought, his face flushing. “Tell me why I’m here,” he said.

“A lot of new children are becoming ill, and some of them are dying,” Augustine said. “It appears to be a virus. We’re not sure what kind.”

Dicken took a slow breath. “The CDC isn’t allowed to investigate Emergency Action schools. Turf war, right?”

Augustine tipped his head. “Only in a few states. Ohio reserved control of its schools. Congressional politics,” he said. “Not my wish.”

“I don’t know what I can do. You should be shipping in every doctor and public health worker you can get.”

“Ohio school medical staff by half last year, because the new children were healthier than most kids. No joke.” Augustine leaned forward in the seat. “We’re going to what may be the school most affected.”

“Which one?” Dicken asked, massaging his leg.

“Joseph Goldberger.”

Dicken smiled ruefully. “You’ve named them after public health heroes? That’s sweet, Mark.”

Augustine did not deviate from his course. His eyes looked dead, and not just from being tired. “Last night, all but one of the doctors deserted the school. We don’t yet have accurate records on the sick and the dead. Some of the nurses and teachers have walked, too. But most have stayed, and they’re trying to take up the slack.”

“Warriors,” Dicken said.

“Amen. The director, against my express orders but at the behest of the governor, has instituted a lockdown. Nobody leaves the barracks, and no visitors are allowed in. Most of the schools are in a similar situation. That’s why I asked you to join me, Christopher.”

Dicken watched the highway, the passing cars. It was a lovely afternoon and everything appeared normal. “How are they handling it?”

“Not well.”

“Medical supplies?”

“Low. Some interruption in the state supply chain. As I said, this is a state school, with a state-appointed director. I’ve ordered in federal emergency supplies from EMAC warehouses, but they may not get here until later tomorrow.”

“I thought you put together an iron web,” Dicken said. “I thought you covered your ass when they handed you all this, your little fiefdom.”

Augustine did not react, and that in itself impressed Dicken. “I wasn’t clever enough,” Augustine said. “Please listen and keep your head clear. Only select observers are being allowed into the schools until the situation is better understood. I’d like you to conduct a thorough investigation and take samples, run tests. You have credibility.”

Dicken felt there was little sense in accusing or tormenting Augustine any more. His shoulders drooped as he relaxed his back muscles. “And you don’t?” he asked.

Augustine looked down at his hands, inspected his perfectly manicured fingernails. “I am perceived as a disappointed warden who wants out of his job, which I am, and a man who would trump up a health crisis to protect his own hide, which I would not. You, on the other hand, are a celebrity. The press would wash your little pink toes to get your side of this story.”

Dicken made a soft nose-blow of dismissal.

Augustine had lost weight since Dicken last saw him. “If I don’t get the facts and plug them into some tight little bureaucratic columns in the next few days, we may have something that goes far beyond sick children.”

“Goddammit, Mark, we know how Shiver works,” Dicken said. “Whatever this is, it is not Shiver.”

“I’m sure you’re right,” Augustine said. “But we need more than facts. We need a hero.”

28

PENNSYLVANIA

Grief had been tracking Mitch Rafelson like a hunter. It had him in its eyebeams, painting him like a target, preparing to bring him down and settle in for a long feast.

He felt like stopping the Dodge on the side of the road, getting out, and running. As always, he stuffed these dark thoughts into a little drawer in the basement of his skull. Anything that demonstrated he was other than a loving father, all the emotions that had not been appropriate for eleven years and more, he hid away down there, along with the old dreams about the mummies in the Alps.

All the spooky little guesses about the situation of the long-dead Neandertals, mother and father, and the mummified, modern infant they had made before dying in the cold, in the long deep cave covered with ice.

Mitch no longer had such dreams. He hardly dreamed at all. But then, there wasn’t much else left of the old Mitch, either. He had been burned away, leaving a thin skeleton of steel and stone that was Stella’s daddy. He did not even know anymore whether his wife loved him. They hadn’t made love in months. They didn’t have time to think about such things. Neither complained; that was just the way it was, no energy or passion left after dealing with the stress and worry.

Mitch would have killed Fred Trinket if the police and the van hadn’t been there. He would have broken the man’s neck, then looked into the bastard’s startled eyes as he finished the twist. Mitch ran that image through his head until he felt his stomach jump.

He understood more than ever how the Neandertal papa must have felt.

Seven miles. They were on the outskirts of Pittsburgh. The road was surrounded by blaring ads trying to get him to buy cars, buy tract homes, spend money he did not have. The houses beyond the freeway were packed close, crowded and small, and the big brick industrial buildings were dirty and dark. He hardly noticed a tiny park with bright red swings and plastic picnic tables. He was looking for the right turnoff.

“There it is,” he told Kaye, and took the exit. He glanced into the backseat. Stella was limp. Kaye held her. Together like that, they reminded him of a statue, a Pietà. He hated that metaphor, common enough on the fringe sites on the Internet: the new children as martyrs, as Christ. Hated it with a passion. Martyrs died. Jesus had died horribly, persecuted by a blind state and an ignorant, bloodthirsty rabble, and that was certainly not going to happen to Stella.

Stella was going to live until long after Mitch Rafelson had rotted down to dry, interesting bones.

The safe house was in the rich suburbs. The tree-filled estates here were nothing like the land around the little frame house in Virginia. Smooth asphalt and concrete roads served big new houses from the last hot run of the economy. Here the streets were lined on both sides with fresh-cut stone walls set behind mature pines and broken only by black iron gates topped with spikes.

He found the number painted on the curb and pulled the Dodge up to a hooded security keypad. The first time, he fumbled the number and the keypad buzzed. A small red light blinked a warning. The second time, the gate rolled open smoothly. Leaves rustled in the maple trees overarching the driveway.

“Almost there,” he said.

“Hurry,” Kaye said quietly.

29

Joseph Goldberger School for Children With Special Needs,

Emergency Action Ohio, Central District Authority

A small contingent of Ohio National Guard trucks—Dicken counted six, and about a hundred troops—had drawn up at the crossroads. A perennial around the school, blooming every spring and summer, dying back in the winter, protesters stood in clumps away from the troops and the alarm trip wires. Dicken guessed that today they numbered three or four hundred today, more than usual and more energetic as well. Most of the protesters were younger than thirty, many younger than twenty. Some wore brightly tie-dyed T-shirts and baggy slacks and had felted their hair in long bleached dreadlocks. They sang and shouted and waved signs denouncing “Virus Abominations” genetically engineered by corporate mad scientists. Two news trucks poked their white dish antennae at the sky. Reporters were out interviewing the protesters, feeding the hungry broadband predigested opinion and some visuals. Dicken had seen all this many times.

On the news, the protesters’ standard line was that the new children were artificial monsters designed to help corporations take over the world. GM Kids, they called them, or Lab Brats, or Monsanto’s Future Toadies.

Pushed back almost into the grass and gravel of a makeshift parking lot were a few dozen parents. Dicken could easily tell them apart from the protesters. The parents were older, conservatively dressed, worn down and nervous. For them, this was no game, no bright ritual of youthful passage into a dull and torpid maturity.

The staff car and its two escorts approached the first perimeter gate through a weave of concrete barricades. Protesters swarmed the fence, swinging their signs in the direction of the protected road. The largest sign out front, scrawled in red marker and brandished by a skinny boy with prominent bad teeth, read, hey hey usa/ don’t fuck with nature’s dna!

“Just shoot them,” Dicken muttered.

Augustine nodded his tight-lipped concurrence.

Damn, we agree on something, Dicken thought.

In the beginning, the protesters had nearly all been parents, arriving at the schools by the thousands, some hangdog and guilty, some grim and defiant, all pleading that their children be allowed to go home. Back then, the nursery buildings had been filled and the dorms under construction or empty. The parents had mounted their vigils year-round, even in the dead of winter, for more than five years. They had been the best of citizens. They had surrendered their children willingly, trusting government promises that they would eventually be returned.

Mark Augustine had been unable to fulfill that promise, at first because of what he thought he knew, but in later years because of grim political reality.

Americans by and large believed they were safer with the virus children put away. Sealed up, out of sight. Out of range of contagion.

Dicken watched Augustine’s expression change from studied indifference to steely impassivity as the staff car climbed the sloping road to the plateau. There the massive complex sat flat and ugly like a spill of children’s blocks on the Ohio green.

The car maneuvered around the barricades and pulled up to the dazzling concrete gatehouse, whiter even than the clouds. As the guards checked their schedule of appointments and consulted with the Secret Service agents, Augustine stared east through the car window at a row of four long, ocher-colored dormitories.

It had been a year since Augustine had last inspected Goldberger. Back then, lines of kids had moved between classrooms, dormitories, and cafeteria halls, attended by teachers, interns, security personnel. Now, the dormitories seemed deserted. An ambulance had been parked by the inner gate to the barracks compound. It, too, was unattended.

“Where are the kids?” Dicken asked. “Are they all sick?”

30

PENNSYLVANIA

Stella saw and felt everything in ragged jerks. Being moved was an agony and she cried out, but still, the shadows insisted on hurting her. She saw asphalt and stone and gray bricks, then a big upside-down tree, and finally a bed with tight pink sheets. She saw and heard adults talking in the light of an open door. Everything else was dark, so she turned toward the darkness—it hurt less—and listened with huge ears to voices in another room. For a moment, she thought these were the voices of the dead, they were saying such incredible things, harmonizing with a weird joy. They were discussing fire and hell and who was going to be eaten next, and a mad woman laughed in a way that made her flesh crawl.

The flesh did not stop crawling. It just kept on going, and she lay in the bed with no skin, staring up at cobwebs or ghostly arms or just floaters inside her eyeballs, tiny chains of cells magnified to the size of balloons. She knew they were not balloons. It did not matter.

Kaye was beyond exhaustion. Iris Mackenzie sat her down in a chair with a cup of coffee and a cookie. The house was huge and bright inside with the colors and tones rich folks choose: creams and pale grays, Wedgwood blues and deep, earthy greens.

“You have to eat something and rest,” Iris told her.

“Mitch…” Kaye began.

“He and George are with your girl.”

“I should be with her.”

“Until the doctor arrives, there’s nothing you can do.”

“A sponge bath, get that temperature down.”

“Yes, in a minute. Now rest, Kaye, please. You nearly fainted on the front porch.”

“She should be in a hospital,” Kaye said, her eyes going a little wild. She managed to stand, pushing past Iris’s gentle hands.

“No hospital will take her,” Iris said, turning restraint into a hug and sitting her down again. Iris pressed her cheek against Kaye’s and there were tears on it. “We called everyone on the phone tree. Lots of the new children have it. It’s on the news already, hospitals are refusing admissions. We’re frantic. We don’t know about our son. We can’t get through to Iowa.”

“He’s in a camp?” Kaye was confused. “We thought the network was just active parents.”

“We are very active parents,” Iris said with iron in her tone. “It’s been two months. We’re still listed, and we will stay listed as long as we can help. They can’t hurt us any more than they already have, right?”

Iris had the brightest green eyes, set like jewels in a face that was farmer’s daughter pretty, with light, florid Irish cheeks and dark brown hair, a slender physique, thin, strong fingers that moved rapidly, touching her hair, her blouse, the tray, and the kettle, pouring hot water into the bone china cups and stirring in instant coffee.

“Does the disease have a name?” Kaye asked.

“No name yet. It’s in the schools—the camps, I mean. Nobody knows how serious it is.”

Kaye knew. “We saw a girl. She was dead. Stella may have got it from her.”

“God damn it,” Iris said, teeth clenched. It was a real curse, not just an exclamation.

“I’m sorry I’m so scattered,” Kaye said. “I need to be with Stella.”

“We don’t know it isn’t catching… for us. Do we?”

“Does it matter?” Kaye said.

“No. Of course not,” Iris said. She wiped her face. “It absolutely does not matter.” The coffee was being ignored. Kaye had not taken a sip. Iris walked off. Turning, she said, “I’ll get some alcohol and a bath sponge. Let’s get her temperature down.”

31

OHIO

The director greeted the staff car at the tangent where the wide circular drive met the steps to the colonnade of the administration building. He wore a brown suit and stood six feet tall, with wheat-colored hair thinning at the crown, a bulbous nose, and almost no cheek bones. Two women, one large and one short, dressed in green medical scrubs, stood at the top of the steps. Their features were obscured by the shadow of a side wall that blocked the low sun.

Augustine opened the door and got out without waiting for the driver. The director dried his hands on his pants leg, then offered one to shake. “Dr. Augustine, it’s an honor.”

Augustine gave the man’s hand a quick grip. Dicken pushed his leg out, grasped the handle over the door, and climbed from the car. “Christopher Dicken, this is Geoffrey Trask,” Augustine introduced him.

Behind them, the two Secret Service cars made a V, blocking the drive. Two men stepped out and stood by the open car doors.

Trask mopped his brow with a handkerchief. “We’re certainly glad to have both of you,” he said. At six thirty in the evening, the heat was slowly retreating from a high of eighty-five degrees.

Trask flicked his head to one side and the two women descended the steps. “This is Yolanda Middleton, senior nurse and paramedic for the pediatric care center.”

Middleton was in her late forties, heavy-set, with classic Congolese features, short-cut wild hair, immense, sad eyes, and a bulldog expression. Her uniform was wrinkled and stained. She nodded at Dicken, then examined Augustine with blunt suspicion.

“And this is Diana DeWitt,” Trask continued. DeWitt was small and plump-faced with narrow gray eyes. Her green pants hung around her ankles and she had rolled up her sleeves. “A school counselor.”

“Consulting anthropologist, actually,” DeWitt said. “I travel and visit the schools. I arrived here three days ago.” She smiled sadly but with no hint that she felt put-upon. “Dr. Augustine, we have met once before. This would be a pleasure, Dr. Dicken, under other circumstances.”

“We should get back,” Middleton said abruptly. “We’re very short-staffed.”

“These people are essential, Ms. Middleton,” Trask admonished.

Middleton flared. “Jesus himself could visit, Mr. Trask, and I’d make him pitch in. You know how bad it is.”

Trask put on his most royal frown—a poor performance—and Dicken moved in to defuse the tension. “We don’t know,” he said. “How bad is it?”

“We shouldn’t talk out here,” Trask looked nervously at the small crowd of protesters beyond the fence, more than two hundred yards away. “They have those big ears, you know, listening dishes? Yolanda, Diana, could you accompany us? We’ll carry on our discussion inside.” He walked ahead through the false columns.

One agent joined them, following at a discreet distance.

All of the older buildings were a jarring shade of ocher. The architecture screamed prison, even with the bronze plate on the wall and the sign over the front gate insisting that this was a school.

“On orders from the governor, we have a press blackout,” Trask said. “Of course, we don’t allow cell phones or broadband in the school, and I’ve taken the central switchboard offline for now. I believe in a disciplined approach to getting out our message. We don’t want to make it seem worse than it is. Right now, my first priority is procuring medical supplies. Dr. Kelson, our lead physician, is working on that now.”

Inside the building, the corridors were cooler, though there was no air conditioning. “Our plant has been down, my apologies,” Trask said, looking back at Augustine. “We haven’t been able to get repair people in. Dr. Dicken, this is an honor. It truly is. If there’s anything I can explain—”

“Tell us how bad it is,” Augustine said.

“Bad,” Trask said. “On the verge of being out of control.”

“We’re losing our children,” Middleton said, her voice breaking. “How many today, Diane?”

“Fifty in the past couple of hours. A hundred and ninety today, total. And sixty last night.”

“Sick?” Augustine asked.

“Dead,” Middleton said.

“We haven’t had time for a formal count,” Trask said. “But it is serious.”

“I need to visit a sick ward as soon as possible,” Dicken said.

“The whole school is a sick ward,” Middleton said.

“It’s tragic,” DeWitt said. “They’re losing their social cohesion. They rely on each other so much, and nobody’s trained them how to get along when there’s a disaster. They’ve been both sheltered and neglected.”

“I think their physical health is our main concern now,” Trask said.

“I assume there’s some sort of medical center,” Dicken said. “I’d like to study samples from the sick children as quickly as possible.”

“I’ve already arranged for that,” Trask said. “You’ll work with Dr. Kelson.”

“Has the staff given specimens?”

“We took samples from the sick children,” Trask said, and smiled helpfully.

“But not from the staff?” Dicken blinked impatiently at Trask.

“No.” The director’s ears pinked. “Nobody saw the need. We’ve been hearing rumors of a full quarantine, a complete lockdown, everyone, no exceptions. Most of us have families…” He let them draw their own conclusions about why he did not want the staff tested. “It’s a tough choice.”

“You sent samples to the Ohio Department of Health and the CDC?”

“They’re waiting to go out now,” Trask said.

“You should have sent them as soon as the first child became ill,” Dicken said.

“There was complete confusion,” Trask explained, and smiled. Dicken could tell Trask was the sort of man who hid doubt and ignorance behind a mask of pleasantry. Nothing wrong here, friends. All is under control. As if expressing a confidence, Trask added, “We are used to them being so healthy.”

Dicken glanced at Augustine, hoping for some clue as to what was really going on here, what relationship or control Augustine had over a person like Trask, if any. What he saw frightened him. Augustine’s face was as calm as a colorless pool of water on a windless day.

This was not the Mark Augustine of old. And who this new man might become was not something Dicken wanted to worry about, not now.

They passed an elevator and a flight of stairs.

“My office is up there, along with the communications and command center,” Trask said. “Dr. Augustine, please feel free to use it. It’s on the second floor, with the best view of the school, well, besides the view from the guard towers, which we use mostly for storage now. First, we’ll visitthe medical center. You can begin work there immediately—away from the confusion.”

“I’d like to see the children right away,” Dicken insisted.

“By all means,” Trask said, eyes shifting. “It will be hard to miss the children.” The director walked ahead at a near lope, then looked over his shoulder, saw that Dicken was not nearly as nimble, and doubled back.

DeWitt seemed eager to say something, but not while Trask was in earshot.

“Let me describe our facilities,” Trask said. “Joseph Goldberger is the largest school in Ohio, and one of the largest in the country.” His hands waved as if outlining a box. “It was built six years ago on the site of the Warren K. Pernicke Corrections Center, a corporate facility administered by Namtex Limited. Pernicke was shut down after the change in drug laws and the subsequent twenty percent drop in the prison population.” He was sounding more and more like a tour guide working from a prepared lecture, adding to the surreality. “The contract to convert the complex to hold SHEVA children was let out to CGA and Nortent, and they finished their work in nine months, a record. Four new dorms were erected a hundred yards east of the maximum security building, which was first constructed in 1949. The old hospital and farm buildings were made into research and clinical facilities. The business training building was converted into a nursery, and now it’s an education center. The four-hundred-bed special offenders compound now holds our mentally ill and developmentally disabled. We call it our Special Treatment Facility. It’s the only one in the state.”

“How many children are kept there?” Dicken asked.

“Three hundred and seven,” Trask said.

“They were more isolated,” Middleton said.

“Dr. Jurie or Dr. Pickman can tell you more about that,” Trask said. For the first time, his pleasant demeanor flickered. “Although…”

“I haven’t seen them,” Middleton said.

“Someone told me they left early this morning,” DeWitt said. “Perhaps to get supplies,” she added hopefully.

“Well.” Trask’s Adam’s apple bobbed like a swallowed walnut and he shook his head with a waxy kind of concern. “As of yesterday, the school housed a total of five thousand four hundred children.” He stole a quick look at his watch. “We simply don’t have what we need.” He escorted them to the west end of the building, and then down a wide connecting corridor lined with old refrigerators. The old white boxes were sealed with black and yellow tape. Empty equipment carts and stacked steel trays littered the passageway. The air was redolent of Pine-Sol.

DeWitt walked beside Dicken like a shipwrecked passenger hoping for a scrap of wood. “They use the Pine-Sol to disrupt scenting and frithing,” she said in an undertone. Frithing was a way SHEVA children drew scent into their mouths. They lifted their upper lips and sucked air through their teeth with a faint hiss. The air passed over their vomeronasal organs, glands for detecting pheromones far more sensitive than those found in their parents. “The security and many of the staff wear nose plugs.”

“That’s pretty standard in the schools,” Middleton said to Dicken, with a fleeting look at Augustine. She opened a battered steel storage cabinet and pulled out scrub uniforms and surgical masks. “So far, thank God, none of the staff has gotten sick.”

Dicken and Augustine put the uniforms on over their street clothes, strapped on the masks, and slipped their hands into the sterile gloves. They paused as an older man, in his late sixties or early seventies, stooped and eagle-nosed, pushed through the swinging doors at the end of the hall.

“Here’s Dr. Kelson now,” Trask said, his back stiffening.

Kelson wore a surgical gown and cap, but the gown hung on him, straps loose, and his hands were bare. He approached Augustine, gave him a brusque nod, then turned to Middleton. “Gloves,” he demanded. Middleton reached into the locker and handed him a pair of examination gloves. Kelson snapped them on and held them up for inspection. “No go with Department of Health. I asked for a NuTest, antivirals, hydration kits. Not available, they claimed. Hell, I know they have what we need! They’re just holding on to them in case this breaks loose.”

“It will not break loose,” Trask said, his smile faltering.

“Did Trask tell you about our shortage?” Kelson inquired of Augustine.

“We understand it’s a crisis,” Augustine said.

“It’s goddamned murder!” Kelson roared. DeWitt jumped. “Three months ago, state Emergency Action officials stripped us of more than half of our medical equipment and drugs. Our entire emergency supply was looted. We have ‘healthy children,’ they told us. The supplies could be better used elsewhere. Trask did nothing to stop them.”

“I would disagree with that characterization,” Trask said. “There was nothing I could do.”

“Last ditch effort, I took a truck into town,” Kelson continued. “I smeared mud on the doors and the license plates but they knew. Dayton General told me to stay the hell away. I got nothing. So I came back and slipped in through the Miller’s Road entrance. Now even that is blocked.” Kelson waved his hand, drunk with exhaustion, and turned his heartsick, skim-milk blue eyes on Dicken. “Who are you?”

Augustine introduced them.

Kelson pointed a knobby gloved finger at Dicken. “You are my witness, Dr. Dicken. The infirmary filled first. It’s down this way. We’re removing bodies by the hundreds. You should see. You should see.”

32

PENNSYLVANIA

Mitch tended to Stella in the bedroom’s dim light. She would not hold still. He used all the gentle phrases and tones of voice he could muster; none of them seemed to get through to her.

George Mackenzie watched from the doorway. He was in his early forties and beyond plump. He had a young face with inquiring eyes, his forehead overarched by a styled shock of premature gray hair, and his lip sported a light dust of mustache.

“I need an ear or rectal thermometer,” Mitch said. “She might convulse and bite down on an oral one. We’ll have to hold her.”

“I’ll get one,” George said, and was gone for a moment, leaving Mitch alone with the tossing child. Her forehead was as dry as a heated brick.

“I’m here,” Mitch whispered. He pulled the covers back completely. He had undressed Stella and her bare legs looked skeletal against the pink sheets. She was so sick. He could not believe his daughter was so sick.

George returned holding a blue plastic sheath in one hand and the thermometer in the other, followed by the women. Kaye carried a basin of water filled with ice cubes, and Iris held a washcloth and a bottle of rubbing alcohol. “We never bought an ear thermometer,” George said apologetically. “We never felt the need.”

“I’m not afraid now,” Iris said. “George, I was afraid to touch their little girl. I am so ashamed.”

They held Stella and took her temperature. It was 107. Her normal temperature was 97. They frantically sponged her, working in shifts, and then moved her into the bathroom, where Kaye had filled a tub with water and ice. She was so hot. Mitch saw that she had bleeding sores in her mouth.

Grief looked on, dark and eager.

Kaye helped Mitch take Stella back to the bed. They did not bother to towel her off. Mitch held Kaye lightly and patted her back. George went downstairs to heat soup. “I’ll put on some chicken broth for the girl,” George said.

“She won’t take it,” Kaye said.

“Then some soup for us.”

Kaye nodded.

Mitch watched his wife. She was almost not there, she was so tired and her face was so drawn. He asked himself when the nightmare would be over. When your daughter is gone and not before.

Which of course was no answer at all.

They ate in the darkened room, sipping the hot broth from cups. “Where’s the doctor?” Kaye asked.

“He has two others ahead of us,” George said. “We were lucky to get him. He’s the only one in town who will treat new children.”

33

OHIO

The infirmary was on the first floor of the medical center, an open room about forty feet square meant to house at most sixty or seventy patients. The curtained separators had been pushed against the walls and at least two hundred cots, mattresses, and chair pads had been moved in.

“We filled this space in the first six hours,” Kelson said.

The smell was overwhelming—urine, vomit, the assaulting miasma of human illness, all familiar to Dicken, but there was more to it—a tang both sharp and foreign, disturbing and pitiful all at once. The children had lost control of their scenting. The room was thick with untranslatable pheromones, vomeropherins, the arsenal and vocabulary of a kind of human communication that was, if not new, at least more overt.

Even their urine smelled different.

Trask took a handkerchief from his pocket and covered his already masked mouth and nose. Augustine’s Secret Service agent took a position in the corner and did the same, visibly shaken.

Dicken approached a corner cot. A boy lay on his side, his chest barely moving. He was seven or eight, from the second and last wave of SHEVA infants. A girl the same age or a little older squatted beside the cot. She held the boy’s fingers around a tiny silvery digital music player, to keep him from dropping it. The headphones dangled over the side of the bed. Both were brown-haired, small, with brown skin and thin, flaccid limbs.

The girl looked up at Dicken as he came near. He smiled back at her. Her eyes rolled up and she tipped her tongue through her lips, then dropped her head on the cot beside the boy’s arm.

“Bond friends,” DeWitt said. “She has her own cot, but she won’t stay there.”

“Then move the cots together,” Augustine suggested with a brief look of distaste or distress.

“She won’t move more than a few inches away from him,” DeWitt said. “Their health probably depends on each other.”

“Explain,” Dicken said softly.

“When they’re brought here, the children form frithing teams. Two or three will get together and establish a default scenting range. The teams coalesce into larger groups. Support and protection, perhaps, but mostly I think it’s about defining a new language.” DeWitt shook her head, wrapped her masked mouth in the palm of one hand, and gripped her elbow. “I was learning so much…”

Dicken took the boy’s chin and gently turned it: head flopping on a scrawny neck. The boy opened his eyes and Dicken met the blank gaze and stroked his forehead, then ran his rubber-gloved finger over the boy’s cheek. The skin stayed pale.

“Capillary damage,” he murmured.

“The virus is attacking their endothelial tissues,” Kelson said. “They have red lesions between the fingers and toes, some of them vesicular. It’s goddamned tropical in its weirdness.”

The boy closed his eyes. The girl lifted her head. “I’m not his perf,” she said, her voice like a high sough of wind. “He lost his perf last night. I don’t think he wants to live.”

DeWitt knelt beside the girl. “You should go back to your cot. You’re sick, too.”

“I can’t,” the girl said, and again lay down her head.

Dicken stood and tried desperately to clear his mind.

The director tsked in pity. “Absolute confusion,” Trask said, voice muffled by the handkerchief. His phone rang in his pocket. He apologized, lowered the cloth, then half turned to answer it. After a few mumbled replies, he closed the phone. “Very good news. I’m expecting a truck filled with supplies from Dayton any minute, and I want to be there. Dr. Kelson, Ms. Middleton—I leave these people with you. Dr. Augustine, do you want to work from my office or would you prefer to stay here? I imagine you have many administrative duties…”

“I’ll stay here,” Augustine said.

“Your privilege,” Trask said. With some astonishment, they watched the director toss a nonchalant, almost dismissive wave and make his way around the rows of cots to the door.

Kelson rolled his milky eyes. “Good fucking riddance,” he murmured.

“The children are losing all social cohesion,” DeWitt said. “I’ve tried to tell Trask for months that we needed more trained observers, professional anthropologists. Losing bond friends—sometimes they call them perfs—do you realize what that means to them?”

“Diana’s their angel,” Kelson said. “She knows what they’re thinking. That may be as important as medicine in the next few hours.” He shook his head, jowls jiggling beneath his chin. “They are innocents. They do not deserve this. Nor do we deserve Trask. That state-appointed son of a bitch is in on this, I’m sure of it. He’s squeezing profits somewhere.” Having said his piece, Kelson looked up at the ceiling. “Pardon me. It’s the goddamned truth. I have to get back. The medical center is at your disposal, Dr. Dicken, such as it is.” He turned and walked down a row of cots, through the door on the opposite side of the infirmary.

“He’s a good man,” Middleton said. She used a key to open the back door to the main compound, opening on to the infirmary loading dock. She lifted an eyebrow at Dicken. “Used to be pretty cushy around here, room and board, easy work, best school in the world, the kids were so easy, we said. Then they up and ran, the bastards.”

Middleton led them down the loading ramp to a golf cart parked in the receiving area. DeWitt sat beside her. “Get on, gentlemen.”

“Any guesses?” Augustine asked Dicken in an undertone as they climbed onto the middle bench seat. The Secret Service agent, now almost invisible to Dicken, sat on the rear-facing backseat and murmured into a lapel mike.

Dicken shrugged. “Something common—coxsackie or enterovirus, some kind of herpes. They’ve had trouble with herpes before, prenatal. I need to see more.”

“I could have brought a NuTest, if there had been some warning,” Augustine said.

“Wouldn’t help us much,” Dicken said. Something new and unfamiliar had struck the children. If a new virus flooded the first rank of a person’s defenses—the innate immune system—and spread to others quickly enough, in close quarters, among confined populations, it could overwhelm any more refined immune response and bring down a huge number of victims in days. He doubted that contact immunity could have had any influence in this outbreak. Another of Mother Nature’s little screwups. Or not. He still had a lot to unlearn when it came to viruses and disease, a lot of assumptions to reexamine.

Dicken needed to map the river of this illness before he would venture an answer, chart it back from whatever tributary they were at now to its source. He wanted to know the virus when it was asleep, what he called glacial virus—learn where it hid as frozen snow in the high valleys of the human and animal population, before it melted and became the torrent they were now seeing.

If he found anything closer to that ideal source, that beginning, things might fall into place. He might understand.

Or not.

What they all needed to know as a practical matter was whether this flood would jump its banks and find another run. Taking specimens from the staff would begin to answer that question. But he already had a gut feeling that this disease, attacking a new and juicy population, would not readily cross over to old-style humans.

Proving that would, in any sane world, stop the political nightmare building outside.

They passed a crate of body bags the end of the loading dock.

“No trouble getting those,” Middleton said. “They’re going to be filled in a couple of hours.”

34

PENNSYLVANIA

Mitch washed his face for the fourth or fifth time in the bathroom adjacent to the bedroom. He stared at the brass light fixtures, the antique gold faucets, the tile floor. He had never been much for luxuries, but it would have been nice to provide more than just a run-down shack in the Virginia countryside. They had been plagued by ants and by roaches. The big yard had been nice, though. He had liked to sit there with Stella and drag a string for the ever-willing Shamus.

The doctor arrived. He was in his early thirties, hair spiked and frosted. He looked very young. He wore a short-sleeved shirt and carried a black bag and a NuTest diagnostic unit the size of a data phone. He was as worn-out as they were, but he immediately inspected Stella. He took blood and sputum from the girl, who hardly noticed the prick of the little needle. The spit was harder to obtain; Stella’s mouth was as dry as a bone. He smeared these fluids on the business end of the NuTest arrays—little sheets of grooved plastic—then inserted them. A few minutes later, he read the results.

“It’s a virus,” he said. “A picornavirus. No surprise there. Some sort of enterovirus. A variety of Coxsackie, probably. But…” He looked at them with a quizzical, worried expression. “There are some polymorphisms that aren’t in the NuTest library. I can’t make a final determination here.”

“Were the baths the right thing to do?” Mitch asked.

“Absolutely,” the doctor said. “She’s four degrees elevated. Coming down, maybe, but it could spike again. Keep her cool, but don’t wear her down. She’s skin and bones now.”

“She’s naturally slender,” Kaye said.

“Good. She’ll grow up to be a model,” the doctor said.

“Not if I can help it,” Kaye said.

The doctor stared at Kaye. “Don’t I know you?”

“No,” she said. “You don’t.”

“Right,” the doctor said, coming to his senses. He gave Stella the first injection, a broad-spectrum antiviral with multiplex immunoglobulin and B vitamins. “Used these when measles hit a bunch of old kids in Lancaster,” he said, then grimaced and shook his head. “‘Old kids.’ Listen to me. We’re talking in tangles. This isn’t measles, but the shot can’t hurt. It’s only good in a series, however. I’ll report her arrays anonymously to Atlanta. Part of the field program. Completely anonymous.”

Mitch listened without reaction. He was almost beyond caring about anonymity. He looked up as the doctor glanced at the NuTest display and said, “Whoops. Shit.” The display was blinking rapidly, reflecting on the doctor’s face.

“What?”

“Nothing,” the doctor said, but Mitch thought he looked guilty, as if he had screwed up. “Can I have some of that coffee?” the doctor asked. “Cold is fine. I’ve got two more patients tonight.”

He felt Stella under her jaw and behind the ears, then turned her over and inspected her buttocks. A rash was forming on both cheeks. “She’s spiking again.” He turned her over and helped carry her to the bathtub. George had emptied the kitchen ice machine and driven off to get more from the local grocery. They sponged her down with cold tap water. Stella was convulsing by the time George returned.

Mitch lifted Stella out of the tub by her underarms, soaking his clothes. George emptied four bags of ice into the water. Then they lowered her in again.

“It’s too cold,” Stella shrieked thinly.

Mitch’s daughter seemed to weigh almost nothing. She was ephemeral. The illness was stealing her away so quickly he could not react.

The doctor left to get another injection ready.

Kaye held up her daughter’s hand. It was pale and blue. She saw small sores between the girl’s fingers. With a gasp, she dropped the hand and leaned to lift Stella’s foot. She showed the sole to Mitch. Small lesions spotted the flesh between Stella’s toes. “They’re on her hands, too,” Kaye said.

Mitch shook his head. “I don’t know what that is.”

George pushed back from the tub and stood, his face showing alarm. The doctor returned with another syringe. As he was injecting Stella he looked at the girl’s fingers and nodded. He pulled back Stella’s lips and looked into her mouth. Stella moaned.

“Could be herpangina, vesicular stomatitis—” He took a deep breath. “I can’t make the call here with just a NuTest. Treatment with a targeted antiviral would work best, and that requires a positive ID. That should be done in a reference lab, and she should be hospitalized. I just don’t have that kind of equipment.”

“No one will admit her,” George said. “Blanket ban.”

“Disgraceful,” the doctor said, his voice flat from exhaustion. He looked up at George. “It could be communicable. You’ll want to sterilize this bathroom and bleach the sheets.”

George nodded.

“There’s someone who might be able to help,” Mitch said to Kaye, taking her aside.

“Christopher?” Kaye asked.

“Call him. Ask him what’s happening. You know his phone number.”

“His home,” Kaye said. “It’s an old number. I’m not sure where he works now.”

The doctor had dialed up a sentinel CDC report page on his Web phone. “There’s no warning posted,” he said. “But I’ve never seen pediatric warnings for virus children.”

“New children,” George corrected.

“Is it a reportable disease?” Kaye asked.

“It’s not even listed,” the doctor said, but there was something in his face that disturbed Kaye. The NuTest. It’s got a GPS and a broadband hookup to the Department of Health. And from there, to NIH or the CDC. I’m sure of it.

But there was nothing they could do. She shrugged it off.

“Call,” Mitch told Kaye.

“I don’t know who he’s working for now,” Kaye said.

“We have a secure satellite phone,” George said. “No one will back trace. Not that it matters, for us. Our son is already in a camp.”

“There is nothing secure,” Mitch said.

George seemed about to debate this slur on his masculine grasp of crypto-technology.

Kaye held up her hand. “I’ll call,” she said. It would be the first time she had spoken with Christopher Dicken in over nine years.

But all she got was the answering machine in his apartment. “This is Christopher. I’m on the road. My house is occupied by cops and wrestlers. Better yet, remember that I collect strange plagues and store them next to my valuables. Please leave your message.”

“Christopher, this is Kaye. Our daughter is sick. Coxsackie something. Call if you have any clues or advice.”

And she left the number.

35

OHIO

The infirmary stood adjacent to the southwest corner of the equipment barn: two blocks connected by a short corridor with barred windows. The bright security lights drew angular trapezoids of shadow over the concrete courtyard between the buildings, obscuring a lone boy. Tall and chunky, about ten years old, he leaned or slumped against the door to the research wing, arms folded.

“Who’s that?” Middleton called out.

“Toby Smith, ma’am,” the boy said, standing straight. He wobbled and stared at them with tired, blank eyes.

“You sick, Toby?”

“I’m fine, ma’am.”

“Where’s the doctor?” Middleton pulled the cart up ten feet from the boy. Dicken saw the boy’s pallid cheeks, almost free of freckles.

The boy turned and pointed into the research wing. “Doctor Kelson is in the gym. My sister’s dead,” he said.

“I’m sorry to hear that, Toby,” Dicken said, swinging out of the seat of the golf cart. “I’m very sorry to hear it. My sister died some time ago.”

Dicken approached him. The boy’s eyes were rheumy and crusted.

“What did your sister die of?” Toby asked, squinting at Dicken.

“A disease she caught from a mosquito bite. It was called West Nile Virus. May I see your fingers, Toby?”

“No.” The boy hid his hands behind his back. “I don’t want you to shoot me.”

“You ignore that crap, Toby,” Middleton said. “I won’t let them shoot anybody.”

“May I see, Toby?” Dicken persisted. He removed his goggles. Something in his tone, some sympathy, or perhaps the way he smelled—if Toby could still smell him—made the boy look up at Dicken with narrowed eyes and present his hands. Dicken gently reversed the boy’s hand and inspected the palm and the skin between the fingers. No lesions. Toby screwed up his face and wriggled his fingers.

“You’re a strong young man, Toby,” Dicken said.

“I’ve been in the infirmary, helping, and now I’m on break,” Toby said. “I should go back.”

“The kids are so gentle,” DeWitt said. “They bond so tight, like family, all of them. Tell that to the world out there.”

“They don’t want to listen,” Dicken said under his breath.

“They’re scared,” Augustine said.

“Of me?” Toby asked.

The cart’s small walkie-talkie squawked. Middleton pulled away to answer. Her lips drew together as she listened. Then she turned to Augustine. “Security saw the director’s car go out the south entrance ten minutes ago. He was alone. They think he’s skipped.”

Augustine closed his eyes and shook his head. “Someone alerted him. The governor has probably ordered complete quarantine. We’re on our own, for the time being.”

“Then we have to move fast,” Dicken said. “I need specimens from the remaining staff, and from as many of the children as is practical. I need to learn where this virus came from. Maybe we can get word out and stop this insanity. Have the children in special treatment had contact with the children outside?”

“None that I’ve heard of,” Middleton said. “But I am not responsible for that building. That was Aram Jurie’s domain. He and Pickman were part of Trask’s inner circle.”

“Pickman and Jurie said the specials should be kept separate,” DeWitt added. “Something about mental disease being additive in SHEVA children. I think they were interested in the effects of madness and stress.”

Viral triggers, Dicken thought. He was torn between disgust and elation. He might find all the clues he needed, after all. “Who’s there now?”

“There are six nurses left, I think.” Middleton looked away, tears brimming.

“I’ll need specimens from those nurses in particular. Nose swabs, fingernail scrapings, sputum, and blood. I think we should do that now.”

“Christopher is the point man,” Augustine said. “Do whatever he asks.”

“I can take you,” DeWitt said. She squeezed Middleton’s arm supportively. “Yolanda wants to get back to the kids. They need her. I’m baggage for now.”

“Let’s go,” Dicken said. He walked over to Toby. “Thank you, Toby. You’ve been very helpful.”

36

PENNSYLVANIA

George Mackenzie shook Mitch’s shoulder. Mitch lurched up in the bed. The pastel walls of the tidy bedroom swam around him; he did not feel at all rested. He had fallen asleep without pulling back the covers on the bed, still dressed in his rumpled Mr. Smith suit.

“Where’s Kaye? How long have I been asleep?”

“She’s with your daughter,” George said. He looked miserable. “You’ve been out about an hour. Sorry to wake you. Come take a look at the TV.”

Mitch walked into the next room first. Kaye sat on the side of the bed, hands folded between her knees, head bowed. She looked up as Mitch checked Stella, now under the covers. He felt Stella’s forehead. “Fever’s down.”

“Broke about an hour ago. I think. Iris brought some tea and we just sat with her.”

Mitch stared at his daughter’s sleeping face, so pale on the sky blue pillow, topped by a damp, matted thatch of hair. Her breath came in ragged puffs. “What’s with that?”

“She’s been breathing that way since the fever broke. She’s not badly congested. I don’t know what it means. The doctor said he’d be back…” She checked the clock on the nightstand. “By now.”

“He hasn’t come,” George said. “I don’t think he’s going to.”

“George wants me to watch the news,” Mitch said.

Kaye nodded and waved her hand; she would stay.

George led Mitch down the hall to the den and the flat wall-mounted screen. Huge faces sat behind a fancy rosewood desk, talking… Mitch tried to focus.

“I am as liberal as the next fellow, but this scares me,” said a middle-aged male sporting a crew cut. Mitch did not watch much television and did not know who this was.

“Brent Tucker, commentator for Fox Broadband,” George explained. “He’s interviewing a school doctor from Indiana. That’s where our son, Kelly, is.”

“Haven’t we been expecting this?” Tucker was asking. “Isn’t this why we’ve agreed to put the children in these special schools?”

“The footage you’ve just shown, of parents dropping off their children, finally coming forward and cooperating, is very encouraging—” the doctor said.

Tucker interrupted with a stern expression. “You left your post this morning. Were you afraid?”

“I’ve been helping explain the situation to the president’s staff. I’m going back this afternoon to resume my duties.”

“The scientists we’ve interviewed on this show insist that the children could pose a severe risk to the population at large if allowed to roam free. And there are still tens of thousands of them out there, even now. Isn’t it—”

“I cannot agree with that characterization,” the doctor said.

“Yes, well, you left your school, and that says it all, don’t you think?”

The doctor opened and closed his mouth. Tucker moved in, eyes wide, sensing a kill. “The public can’t be fooled. They know what this is about. Let’s look at our forum instant messages and what the public is telling us right now.”

The figures came up on the screen.

“Ten to one, they want you to arrest parents who don’t cooperate, get all the children where we can watch them, and do it now. Ten to one.”

“I do not think that is even practicable. We don’t have the facilities.”

“We built the schools and support your work with taxpayer dollars. You are a public servant, Dr. Levine. These children are the result of a hideous disease. What if it spreads to all of us, and there are no more normal children born, ever?”

“Do you advocate we should exterminate them, for the public good?” Levine asked.

Mitch watched with grim fascination, jaw clamped, as if witnessing a car crash.

“Nobody wants that,” Tucker said with an expression of affronted reason. “But there is an imminent health risk. It’s a matter of survival.”

The doctor put his hands on the rosewood counter. “No illness has spread to staff in any of the schools I’m aware of.”

“Then why aren’t you in the school now, Dr. Levine?”

“They are children, Mr. Tucker. I will be going back to them.”

Mitch clenched his fists until his fingernails dug into his palms.

Tucker smiled, showing perfect white teeth, and turned to the camera, which zoomed to a close shot. “I believe in the people and what they have to say. That is the strength of this nation, and it is also the Fox Media philosophy, fair and balanced, and I am not ashamed to agree with it. I believe there is an instinct for preservation at work among the people, and that is news. That is survival. You’ll catch more details here, Fox Multicast, and touch your screen to check our expanded coverage on the Web—”

George turned off the TV. His voice was thin and choked. “Neighbor must have seen you arrive. He told me he’s going to turn us in for harboring a virus child. A sick child.” He held up and jangled three keys on a ring. “Iris and I have a cabin. It’s about two hours from here, up in the mountains. On a small lake. Real nice, away from everybody. There’s food for at least a week. You can mail back the keys. Your girl is doing better. I’m sure of it. The crisis is past.”

Mitch tried to figure out what their options were—and how adamant Mackenzie was. “She’s not breathing right,” he said.

“I’ve been out of work for five months,” George said. “We’re running out of money. Iris is on the edge of a breakdown. We can’t be a safe house anymore. This neighborhood is like Sun City for the wealthy. They’re old and scared and mean.” George looked up. “If the feds come here and find you, they’ll put your daughter someplace where the care is worse than you can imagine. That’s where our child is, Mitch.”

Kaye stood behind Mitch and touched his elbow, startling him. “Take the keys,” she said.

George suddenly fell back into a chair and shook his head. “Stay here until dawn,” he said. “The neighbors are asleep. I hope to God everybody is asleep. Get some rest. Then, I’m sorry, you have to leave.”

37

OHIO

The Special Treatment center occupied a long, flat, single-story building with reinforced concrete walls. Dicken and DeWitt walked around the empty school trailers and crossed the asphalt square in the brilliant glow of a dozen intense white security lights.

The door to the center hung open. A tangle of sheets and rubber mats had been tossed out like a filthy, lolling tongue. Two iron-barred and wire-reinforced windows gleamed like flat, blank eyes on either side. The building looked dead.

Inside, the air was cooler but not by much, and stank. Beneath the cacophony of stench wavered a weak chord of Pine-Sol. Dicken did not pause, though DeWitt held back and coughed under her mask. He had smelled worse; the professional refrain of a virus hunter.

Beyond the security office and the open double gates of the checkpoint, the doors to all the cells stretched down a long corridor. About half, in no particular order, had been opened. No nurses or guards were in sight.

The body of a boy of eight or nine lay on a mattress in the corridor. Dicken knew the boy was dead from several yards away. He put down his bag of specimen kits, knelt with difficulty beside the soiled mattress, examined the boy with what he hoped was clear-eyed respect, then pushed on the floor and one knee and got up again. He shook his head vigorously at DeWitt’s offer of assistance.

“Don’t touch anything,” he warned. “Yolanda said there were nurses.”

“They probably moved the children into the exercise area. The center has its own yard, at the south end.”

They checked each room, peering through the observation slit or pushing open the heavy steel doors. Some of the rooms held bodies. Most were empty. A black line drawn on the floor marked the division between rooms equipped for children who need restraints or protection: the padded rooms. All of the doors to these rooms had been opened.

Two rooms contained bodies lying on cots in restraints, one male, one female, both with abnormally large heads and hands.

“It’s a condition unique to SHEVA children,” DeWitt said. “I’ve only seen three like this.”

“Congenital?”

“Nobody knows.”

Dicken counted twenty dead by the time they reached the door at the end. This door was a rolling wall of steel bars covered with thick sheets of acrylic.

“I think this is where Jurie and Pickman ordered the violent children kept,” DeWitt said.

Someone had jammed a broken cinder block into the track to prevent the door from automatically closing, and a red light and LED display flashed a security warning. Behind thickly shaded glass, the guard booth was empty, and the alarm had been hammered into silence.

“We don’t have to go through here,” DeWitt said. “The yard is that way.” She pointed down a short hall to the right.

“I need to see more,” Dicken said. “Where are the nurses?”

“With the living children, I presume. I hope.”

They squeezed through the narrow opening. All the doors beyond were locked by a double bar system, one lateral, one reaching from the ceiling to the floor and slipping into steel-clad holes. Each room held a lone, unmoving child. One stared in frozen surprise at the ceiling. Some appeared to be asleep. It did not look as if they had received any attention. There were at least eight children in these rooms, and no way to confirm they were all dead.

None of them moved.

Dicken stepped back from the last thick view port, shoved his back against the concrete wall, then, with an effort, pushed off and faced DeWitt. “The yard,” he said.

About ten paces beyond the door, they met two of the treatment center nurses. They were sharing a cigarette and sprawling on plastic chairs in the shade at the end of a broad corridor lined with padded picnic tables. The two women were in their fifties, very large, with beefy arms and large, fat hands. They wore dark green uniforms, almost black in the overhead glare. They looked up listlessly as Dicken and DeWitt came into view.

“We done everything we could,” one of them said, eyes darting.

Dicken nodded, simply acknowledging their presence—and perhaps their courage.

“There are more out there,” said the other nurse, louder, as they walked past. “It’s damned near midnight. We needed a break!”

“I’m sure you did your best,” DeWitt said. Dicken instantly caught the contrast: DeWitt’s voice, precise and academic, educated; the nurses’, pragmatic and blue collar.

The nurses were townies.

“Fuck you,” the first nurse tried to shout, but it came out a wan croak. “Where was everybody? Where’re the doctors?”

Brave townies. They cared. They could have bolted, but they had stayed.

Dicken stood in the yard. A canvas tent had been pulled over a concrete quadrangle about fifty feet on a side and surrounded by tan, stucco-covered walls. The lighting was inadequate, just wall-mounted pathway illumination surrounding the open square. The center was a shadowy pit.

Cots and mattresses had been laid out on the concrete in rows that began with some intention of order and ended in scattered puzzles. There were at least a hundred children under the tent, most of them lying down. Four women, two men, and one child walked between the cots, carrying buckets and ladles, giving the children water if they were strong enough to sit up.

Moonlight and starry sky showed through gaps and vent flaps. The quadrangle was still almost unbearably hot. All the water coolers in the building had been carried here, and a few hoses hung out of plastic barrels surrounded by fading gray rings of water slop.

A hardy few of the children, most of them younger than ten, sat under the pathway lights with their backs against the stucco walls, staring at nothing, shoulders slumped.

A woman in a white uniform approached DeWitt. She was smaller than the others, tiny, actually, with walnut-colored skin and black almond eyes and short black hair pushed up under a baseball cap. “You’re the counselor, Miss DeWitt?” she asked with an accent. Filipino, Dicken guessed.

“Yes,” DeWitt said.

“Are the doctors coming back? Is there more medicine?” she asked.

“We’re under complete quarantine,” DeWitt said.

The woman looked at Dicken and her face creased with helpless anger. As an outsider, he had failed them all; he had brought nothing useful. “Today and last night was a horror. All my children are gone. I work in special needs. Their only fault was slow wisdom. They were my joy.”

“I’m sorry,” Dicken said. He held up his bag of specimen kits. “I’m an epidemiologist. I need samples from all of the nurses working here.”

“Why? They’re afraid it’s going to spread outside?” She shook her head defiantly. “None of us is sick. Only the children.”

“Knowing what happened here, and how it happened, is important to the children who are still alive.”

“Do you justify this, Mister… whoever the hell you are?” the walnut-colored woman hissed.

“You’ve done your best,” Dicken said. “I know that. We have to keep trying. Keep working.” He swallowed. Tonight was already stacking up to be the worst, the most awful he had ever seen. Nightmare bad.

The woman’s arms trembled. She turned away, then turned back slowly, and her eyes were as flat and dark as the windows at the entrance. “Food would help” she said as if speaking to one of her less intelligent charges. Slow wisdom. “We have to feed those who are still alive.”

“I think there’s enough food,” DeWitt said.

“How many, outside?” the woman asked, hand making a helpless, rotating gesture. “How many have died?”

Dicken had seen such a gesture years ago, at the beginning of all this; he had seen a female chimp reach out for solace and Marian Freedman, who now studied Mrs. Rhine, had grasped the hand and tried to comfort her.

DeWitt held the woman’s hand in just that way. “We don’t know, honey,” she said. “Let’s just take of care of our own.”

“I’m going to need the doors to the cells opened,” Dicken said.

The tiny woman covered her mouth with her hand. “We didn’t go in there,” she said, staring at him with huge eyes. “We couldn’t let them out. Some are violent. Oh, God, I’ve been afraid to look.”

“If they’ve had no contact with adults, then it’s all the more important that I get some specimens,” Dicken said.

The woman dropped her hand from her mouth—it shook as if with palsy—and stared at DeWitt.

“Come on,” DeWitt said, taking her elbow and guiding her. “I’ll help.”

“What if some are still alive?” the small woman asked plaintively.

Some were.

38

PENNSYLVANIA

Mitch glanced down at the digital receiver in the Mackenzies’ Jeep. Kaye leaned forward between the seats and touched his arm. “Is that what I think it is?”

“It appears to be,” Mitch said. “Webcasts. Catches everything for at least an hour back.”

“We’ve been married too long,” Kaye said. “You don’t even ask what I’m talking about.”

“Do you think?” Mitch said, with precisely Kaye’s tone and phrasing.

Stella lay quietly beside Kaye in the backseat. She had gone through one more convulsion, but her fever had not spiked again. She was resting under a thin child’s blanket, her head in Kaye’s lap.

They had caught less than an hour’s nap before leaving the Mackenzie house. Kaye had had a nightmare in which someone very important to her, someone like her father or Mitch, had told her she was a miserable mother, an awful human being, and some shadowy institution was withdrawing all support, which meant life support; she had thought she was running out of oxygen and could not breathe. She had struggled awake and sleep after that was impossible.

The sun was peeking over the highway behind them.

“Turn it on,” Kaye said.

Mitch turned on the receiver. The dashboard display showed a map with a red spot, their position, and the radio tuned automatically to a Philadelphia station, giving stock market news for the morning.

“Did he—”

“George turned off the TheftWave years ago,” Mitch said. “I checked. It’s unplugged. We’re just tracking GPS, not sending.”

“Good.” Kaye reached forward with a grunt, shifting Stella’s head, and pulled out a remote folding keypad. “Fancy,” she said.

Mitch glanced at her in the rearview mirror. She looked haggard, and her eyes were too bright. He could only see part of the gently breathing, blanketed form beside her.

“Are you all right?” he asked.

“I’m fine.” She studied the keypad, then experimented with a few buttons. “Looks like HFMD to me.”

“That’s not a radio station,” Mitch said.

“Hand, foot, and mouth disease. It’s usually a minor viral infection in infants and children. I’m sure she’s been exposed before. Something’s changed. Whatever, we need to stock up on drugs and fluids.”

“Drugstore?”

Kaye shook her head. “I’m sure by now they’ve made this a reportable illness. Every pharmacy in the country will be on the alert, and the hospitals are refusing to take cases… Let’s hear what the world is saying.” The broadband sites were full of digital music, digital advertising, Rush Limbaugh thundering and buzzing away from somewhere in Florida, Dick Richelieu on building that new home, rants by evangelicals, and then BBC World News direct from London. They caught the story in progress. Kaye worked the touch pad and backed up several minutes to the beginning.

“Conditions in Asia and the United States have quickly deteriorated to what can only be described as panic. The prospect of the so-called virus children producing an unknown pathogen capable of causing a pandemic has haunted world governments for a decade, certainly since the strange and disturbing case of Mrs. Rhine seven years ago. And yet the children have remained healthy, in their schools and camps and with their beleaguered families. Now, this new and so-far unexplained illness—given no official diagnosis—is causing widespread disruption in North America, Japan, and Hong Kong. International and even some local airports are blocking flights from affected areas. In the past forty-eight hours, public and private hospitals in the United States have closed their doors to this new illness for fear of becoming part of a proposed general quarantine. Other hospitals in the UK, France, and Italy, announced that should the disease spread to these shores, which some regard as inevitable, they will accept SHEVA children and their relatives only in isolated wards.”

“If you see a vet’s office, stop,” Kaye told him.

“Okay,” Mitch said.

“The illness has not yet spread to Africa, which has the smallest population of SHEVA children, some say because of the prevalence of HIV infection. In Washington, Emergency Action denies that it has begun taking measures based on a top-secret presidential decision directive, a confidential order dating from the early years of Herod’s plague. On some widely touched Web sites, the specter of bioterrorism is being invoked with alarming frequency.”

Kaye turned off the radio and squared her clasped hands in her lap. They were passing through a small town in the middle of fields and grassy plains. “There’s a pet hospital,” Kaye said, pointing to a strip mall on their right.

Mitch swung off the road into the parking lot and parked opposite a square blue-and-gray stucco building. Kaye drew the sun shades in the Jeep’s windows, though the sun was still low in the east and the air was actually cool. “Stay in the back with her,” she said as they both got out. Mitch tried to give Kaye a brief, encouraging hug. She squirmed out of his arms like a cat, made a vexed face, and jogged across the asphalt.

Mitch looked over his shoulder to see if they were being watched, then climbed into the backseat, lifted his daughter’s head, and placed it on his lap. Stella drew breath in short jerks. Her face was covered with small red spots. She curled her knees up and flexed her fingers. “Mitch, my head hurts,” she whispered. “My neck hurts. Tell Kaye.”

“Mom will be back in a few minutes,” Mitch said, feeling a gnawing helplessness. He might as well have been a ghost watching from the land of the dead.

Kaye peered through the venetian blinds in the glass door and saw lights inside and figures moving in a hallway in the back. She banged on the door until a young woman in a blue medical uniform approached with a puzzled look and opened the door a crack.

“We’re just starting the day,” the woman said. “Is this an emergency?” She was in her midtwenties, plump but not heavyset, with strong arms, bleached blonde hair, and pleasant brown eyes.

“I’m sorry to bother you, but we have some trouble with our cat,” Kaye said, and smiled with her most ingratiating and harried expression. The woman opened the door and Kaye entered the hospital’s small lobby. She turned nervously and looked at the admissions counter, the racks of specialized pet food and other products. The woman walked behind the counter, perked up, and smiled. “Well then, welcome. What can we do for you?” Her pocket tag showed a smiling cartoon puppy and the name Betsy.

The good caring women of this Earth, Kaye thought. They are hardly ever beautiful, they are the most beautiful of all. She did not know where this came from and shoved it aside, but first used the emotion to put a sympathetic spark into her smile.

“We’re traveling,” Kaye began. “We’re taking Shamus with us, poor thing. He’s our cat.”

“What’s wrong?” Betsy asked with genuine concern.

“He’s just old,” Kaye said. “Failed kidneys. I thought I brought our supplies with us, but… they’re back in Brattleboro.”

“Do you have a doctor’s sheet? A phone number, someone we can talk with?”

“Shamus hasn’t seen the doctor in months. We moved recently. We’ve been taking care of him on our own. We’ve already been to one pet hospital, up the road a ways… They got mad. It’s so early, and we’ve been up all night. They turned me down flat.” She wrung her hands. “I was hoping you could help.”

Betsy’s eyes glinted with the merest shade of suspicion. “We can’t supply narcotics or pain killers,” she warned.

“Nothing like that,” Kaye said, her heart thumping. She smiled and drew a breath. “Oh, forgive me, I’m so worried about the poor thing. We’ll need Lactated Ringer’s, four or five liters, if you have it, with butterfly clamp, and as many sets of tubes and needles—twenty-five-gauge needles.”

“That’s a little thin for a cat. Take forever to fill her up.”

“It’s a he,” Kaye said. “It’s all he’ll put up with.”

“All right,” Betsy said doubtfully.

“Methyl prednisone,” Kaye said. “To calm him while he’s traveling.”

“We have Depo-Medrol.”

“That’s fine. Do you have vidarabine?”

“Not for cats,” the young woman said, frowning. “I’ll have to check all this with the doctor.”

“He’s at the cabin—our cat. He’s doing poorly, and it’s all my fault. I should have known better.”

“You’ve handled this before… haven’t you?”

“I’m an expert,” Kaye said, and put on a brave, tearful grin.

The young woman entered the list onto a flat-screen monitor. “I’m not sure I even know what vidarabine is.”

Kaye searched her memory, trying to remember the long hours she had spent searching PediaServe, MediSHEVA, and a hundred other sites and databases, years ago, preparing for some unknown disaster. “There’s a new one we use sometimes. It’s called picornavene, enterovene, something like that?”

“We have equine picornavene. Surely that’s not what you’re looking for.”

“Sounds familiar.”

“It comes in quite large doses.”

“Fine. Famicyclovir?”

“No,” Betsy said, very suspicious now. “Drugstore might have that. What kind of life has your cat lived?”

“He was a wild one,” Kaye said.

“If he’s that sick…”

“He means so much to us.”

“You should wait for the vet. He’ll be back in an hour.”

“I’m not sure we have that long,” Kaye said, looking at her watch with a desperate expression she did not have to fake.

“You’re positive you’ve done all this before, you know how it works?”

“We’ve kept him alive for a year. I’ve had him for eighteen years. He’s a brave old tom. I don’t know what I’d do without him.”

The assistant shook her head, dubious but sympathetic. “I could get in trouble.”

Kaye felt no guilt whatsoever. If she had had a gun, she would have held them up, right now, for everything she needed. “I wouldn’t want that,” she said, staring right at the woman.

The assistant waggled her head. “What the hell,” she said. “Old cats. Pain in the butt, huh?”

“You know it,” Kaye said.

“And it’s not like we’re in the big city. Five liters Ringer’s, two hundred mils equine picornavene—that’s the smallest we’ve got—and the Depo-Medrol—” Betsy picked up the printed list. “Credit or debit?”

“Cash,” Kaye said.

39

OHIO

Yolanda Middleton followed Dicken through the school trailers to the old farm buildings. She caught up with him easily and shook out a ring of keys. “We ransacked Trask’s office,” she said. “Found master keys to all the buildings. There’s a tag from when this was a prison. Some of the nurses say there could still be supplies out here, but nobody knows.”

“Great. Did Kelson ever come out here?”

“I don’t think so. This was Dr. Jurie’s lab,” Middleton said. “Dr. Pickman was his assistant. Both were authorized to do research. They stayed away from the rest of us.”

“What sort of research?” Dicken asked.

Middleton shook her head.

Dicken stood on the asphalt path and tapped his shoe lightly on the curb, thinking. He looked over his shoulder at the converted barn, the old business education building, and the three blank-faced concrete cubes between. Then he set off. Middleton followed.

A double steel door marked one side of the closest cube. This was labeled “no admittance” in white letters on the door’s blue enamel.

“What’s in here?”

“Well, among other things, a temporary morgue,” she said. “That’s what they told me. I don’t know that it was ever used.”

“Why here?”

“Dr. Jurie told us we had to keep the bodies of any children who died. The county coroner wouldn’t take them, even though she was supposed to.”

“Were the parents notified?”

“We tried,” Middleton said. “Sometimes they move without giving any forwarding address. They just leave the children behind.”

“Is there a graveyard for the school?”

“Not that I ever heard of. Honestly, Dr. Jurie took care of all that.” Middleton looked distinctly uncomfortable. “We assumed they went to a potter’s field somewhere outside of town. There weren’t that many, really. Two or three, maybe, since the school opened, and only one since I’ve been here. Trask didn’t let word about deaths circulate very far. He called it a private matter.”

Dicken rubbed his fingers together. “Key?”

Middleton looked for a newer key on the ring, and held one up for his inspection. It was labeled R1-F, F for Front, presumably—and R for what, Research? They agreed with a look that this was the best choice. As she pushed the key into the lock, Dicken turned his gaze up the face of concrete, pale gray in the morning light. He narrowed his eye, as he had learned over the years, to help the fogged lens focus on the vent covers near the top, a few pipes sticking out, a thick power line going to a pole and across to the junction box near the old barn.

Middleton pulled the door open. Inside, it was cool enough to make him shiver.

“The air-conditioner works here, at least,” he said.

“It’s separate from the main plant,” Middleton said. “This building’s newer than the rest.”

Dicken took a deep breath. He felt as if he were on a wild goose chase. There might be medicine in these buildings, but he doubted it. More likely they would find laboratory supplies—unless Trask had conspired with the doctors to sell those, too. Still, the lab might be better equipped than the small medical facility adjacent to the infirmary. But these were just excuses.

Something else was bringing him here, an instinctive suspicion that had come to him as he walked among the cots in the special treatment center. We’re curious monkeys, he thought. We never miss opportunities.

He found a light switch on the wall inside the door and pushed it. Fluorescents bathed the interior in a cool, sterile glow. The north wall of the room was covered by stainless steel refrigerators, huge lab units equipped with tiny blue temperature displays. Expensive, and very unlike the small, hump-shouldered units outside the infirmary.

“When did Jurie and Pickman leave?” he asked.

“I’m not sure.”

“Did they take anything?”

Middleton shrugged. “I didn’t see them go. I can’t be everywhere.”

“Of course not,” Dicken said. The mask itched. He reached up to rub his nose, then thought better of it.

“How long will this take?” Middleton asked.

Dicken ignored her. The refrigerators were locked and equipped with push-button keypads. He ran his fingers across one of the pads and shook his head.

Middleton found a key on the ring that opened the door across the room. This led to a small pathology lab with a single steel autopsy table, shining clean. All the tools lay neatly in their trays or in cabinets along the far wall. Some tools had been left in an autoclave, but otherwise the lab was beautifully organized and maintained.

“When was the last autopsy conducted here?” Dicken asked.

“I don’t think there have ever been any,” Middleton said. “I haven’t heard of any, at least. Wouldn’t we have to get permission from the county?”

“Not if they refuse responsibility. Maybe Mark will know.” But he was beginning to doubt that Augustine knew anything. It was beginning to look as if his old CDC boss, the putative director of Emergency Action, had finally been hamstrung—perhaps castrated was the better word—by the political wolves in Washington.

Down a short hall and to the right, they came upon the unexpected mother lode: a fully equipped molecular biology and genetics lab, six hundred square feet of space under a high ceiling, crammed with equipment. Tissue centrifuge sorters provided specimen flow to racked analyzers—matrix and variable-probe sequencers specializing in polynucleotides, RNAs and DNAs; proteomizers capable of discerning complete complements of proteins; glycome and lipidome units for isolating and labeling sugars and fats and related compounds. More racks stood at the ends of broad steel lab benches.

The sorter and analyzers were connected by steel and white plastic automated specimen tracks, running like a little railroad through diffraction molecular imagers, inoculator/incubators, and a variety of video microscopes—including two up-to-the-minute carbon force counters. All magnificently automated. A one- or at most two-person lab.

Everything on and around the benches was hooked up to a small, square, bright red Cenomics Ideator, a dedicated computer capable of three-D imaging and real-time gene and protein description and identification.

There was more than a wealth of equipment here: What Dicken saw as he walked around the room amounted to obscene overkill for a typical school medical facility. He had visited labs in rich biotech firms that wouldn’t have been able to compete.

“Wow,” Dicken said in awe. “This is the whole damned Delta Queen.”

Middleton raised an eyebrow. “I beg your pardon?”

“Nothing.” He walked between the benches, then paused to reach out with his gloved hand and stroke the Ideator. He had his riverboat. He had everything he needed to track the virus back up the river of disease to the far, frozen north—to its sleeping, glacial form.

If no one else was willing to do it, he was sure he could do it all by himself, right here, and screw the unreasoning outside world. With the help of a few manuals. Some of this equipment he had seen only in catalogs.

Dicken leaned over to look at steel tags, identifiers, shipping labels. “Who paid for all this?”

Middleton shook her head. She was as stunned as he, but probably did not fully appreciate the magnitude of their discovery.

He found what he was searching for on the back of one of the carbon force counters. A steel tag read, “property of americol, inc., u.s.a. federally registered corporate loan equipment.”

“Marge Cross,” he said. “Large Marge.”

“What?”

Dicken murmured a quick explanation. Marge Cross was the CEO and majority shareholder of both Americol and Eurocol, two of the world’s largest pharmaceutical and medical equipment manufacturers. He did not add that for a time Marge Cross had employed Kaye Lang.

Dicken said, “Let’s find some way to open those refrigerators. And that.” He pointed to the unmarked stainless steel door—more of a hatch, actually—at the back of the lab.

Middleton shuddered. “I’m not sure I want to,” she said.

Dicken scowled. “We’re tired, aren’t we?”

Chastened, she handed him the ring of keys. “I’ll look for the codes,” she said.

40

THE POCONOS, PENNSYLVANIA

Mitch shifted into four-wheel drive, then pushed the Jeep through a previously broken and mangled section of guardrail—just as George had described it. The Jeep rumbled down the embankment.

Kaye cradled Stella once more in the backseat. Stella did not react to the bumps and lurches. Kaye stared straight ahead, through the windshield, seeing nothing, really, and thinking furiously. She could not shut down her mind, filled with scenes and plans that did not connect in any useful way. She was at the end of her rope, about to be jerked up hard; she knew it, and there was nothing she could do about it.

She was more than half convinced they were going to lose Stella. Making plans for a time after Stella certainly seemed appropriate, but she could not bring herself to do so. Her thoughts became jagged and incomplete, painful.

She could feel her throat starting to constrict, as it had in the nightmare.

“There,” Mitch said. He pointed.

“What?” Kaye wheezed.

“A road.”

As George had told them, they now straddled an almost overgrown path, just barely deserving to be called a road. He swung the Jeep left. The path wound through scrub forest for a quarter of a mile, then connected to a state highway. This way would avoid quarantine roadblocks on the county line.

Mitch’s intuition had been finely honed over the last ten years. He had sharp criminal instincts. He could almost picture Department of Health or FEMA roadblocks, INS agents, or the Philadelphia National Guard checking each vehicle on the main highway, CDC deputy inspectors waiting in the back of an Emergency Action van…

He had seen it all before, while traveling, looking for a new home, seven years ago. During the panic after the discovery of Mrs. Rhine.

Kaye crooned to Stella as she had when Stella was a baby. Stella’s lips were cracked and her forehead hot. Her head lolled until Kaye cradled it in her elbow. She brushed back the luxurious, short-cut hair with her fingers, watched her daughter’s cheeks, alternately flushing and blanching, like a signal light trying to decide whether to stay on. Stella smelled rank in a particularly disturbing way, a sick offspring smell that made Kaye deeply uneasy.

Kaye had not entirely lost the enhanced sense of smell she had developed as the mother of a SHEVA infant, even though she could no longer produce her own communicative pheromones. The pores behind her ears had closed up after two years. Mitch’s had closed even earlier, and their cheek patches, the variegated melanophores, had faded back to normal as well, though in Kaye’s case they had left small, trapped pools of freckles.

Stella’s lips moved. She started speaking, babbling really, in two streams at once. Kaye stroked her daughter’s chin and lips until they stopped their restless action, and Stella reduced the volume to a whisper:

“I want to see the woods/

“There’s so little time/ Leave me in the woods/

“Please./ Please. Please.”

“We’re in the woods, honey,” Kaye told Stella. “We’re in the forest.”

Stella opened her eyes, then, blinded by the light in her face, swung her arm up, nearly knocking Kaye’s nose bloody. Kaye pushed the arm down and covered Stella’s eyes with her hand.

“How much longer?” she asked Mitch.

“Not sure. Maybe an hour.”

“We might lose her before then.”

“She’s not going to die,” Mitch said. “She’s doing better.”

“She won’t drink.”

“You gave her water before we left.”

“She peed on the seat. She’s hot. She won’t drink. How do you know? I don’t know she won’t die.”

“I’m the spooky guy,” Mitch said. “Remember?”

“This isn’t a joke, Mitch,” Kaye said, her voice rising.

“Can’t you smell her?” Mitch asked.

“I smell her better than you do,” Kaye said.

“She isn’t dying. I’d know.”

“Please stop arguing,” Stella murmured, and rolled over, kicking feebly at the door. Her bare feet made the weakest little thumps. “My head hurts. Let me out/ I want to get out.”

Kaye held her daughter against her brief struggles. With a discouraged sigh, the girl went limp again. Kaye looked at the back of Mitch’s head, the uneven cut of his nape, a bad haircut. You saved money where you could. Mitch had never enjoyed haircuts anyway. For a moment, she hated her husband. She wanted to bite and scratch and hit him.

No one knew more about her daughter than she did. Nobody. If Mitch spoke one more time, Kaye thought she would scream.

41

OHIO

Trask or someone working for him had shut down the server that handled all the school’s internal and external landline and satellite communications, and it would not start up without a password. None of the teachers or nurses or Kelson knew that password, and Trask of course was no longer available.

Augustine could guess on motives, but it did not matter. Nothing mattered but doing whatever he could to shake loose the needed supplies. Dicken did not carry a phone. The only working phone at the moment was Augustine’s Web phone.

Personally, and through his secretary in the EMAC office in Indiana, he had sent messages—voice and email—to the heads of all the agencies on his list, confirming his previous calls for supplies. Anything. They had told him they would do their best, but the situation was very tight, and it might take a day or two.

Augustine knew they did not have that long.

One intrepid deputy to an undersecretary at Health and Human Services had suggested he call local media and make his case. “Phones are ringing off the hook over here.”

Augustine had declined. He knew how that would go. The beleaguered and unpopular director of Emergency Action would be picked apart by reporters trying to prove him a liar.

He needed facts to avoid panicking the public even further, and Dicken had not yet delivered anything useful.

Now Augustine sat in a worn secretary’s chair at a small desk near the corner, and used his Web phone to call up reports on the internal NIH Web site. At least they had not locked out his personal account; he was not completely persona non grata.

He studied the freshly posted morning statistics, the numerical anatomy of the disaster, on the phone’s small color screen.

The first case had probably occurred in California, at the Pelican Bay school. Three California penal corporations had won the contracts to house SHEVA children in the Golden State; all had been particularly reluctant to work with any Washington-based authority. Augustine had come to hate those administrators, and those schools; the culture of the California penal system had become inbred, defensive, and arrogant during the last decade of the twentieth century, the Drug War years. He was not surprised that Pelican Bay had not reported the spread of the disease until the day before yesterday. First to notice, next to last to report.

The disease had struck almost simultaneously at fifteen other schools, from Oregon to Mississippi. Dicken would be interested in that fact. Where was the reservoir? Where were the vectors? How had the virus spread before it erupted into pandemic?

How and why had it lain dormant for so long?

Pelican Bay had lost twelve hundred students out of six thousand. One in five. San Luis Obispo and Port Hueneme were reporting smaller percentages, but half the students at Kalispell, almost a thousand, were already gone, and more were expected to die within the next twelve hours. El Cajon, fifty-six out of three hundred.

His eye swept east through the maps and charts. Phoenix, two thousand out of eight thousand. Two thirds had fallen ill in Tucson; half of those were dead. Provo had lost half, but with less than one hundred students. Mormons tended not to hand over their kids without a fight, and there were fewer than a thousand SHEVA children in the three schools in Utah.

Augustine wondered how many of the “home-schooled,” as some agencies called them, the underground virus children, had become ill and died. The disease would spread to them soon enough, he guessed.

In Ohio, Iowa, and Indiana, in twelve schools holding sixty-three thousand children gathered from across the Midwest, over thirteen thousand SHEVA children were now dead.

He was looking at the stats for Illinois when the phone beeped. He answered.

It was Rachel Browning from the SRO.

“Hello, Mark. I hear you called. Sad day,” Browning said.

“Rachel, how nice to hear from you,” Augustine said. “We need supplies here immediately—”

“Hold for a sec. Have to take this one.” Light jazz played over the line. That was too much; he almost snapped the phone shut. But he held his palm away from the cover. Patience was the watchword, certainly now, and certainly for a wraith, a wisp whose tenuous authority could simply wink out at any moment.

Browning came back. “One in four, Mark,” she began, as if it were a sports score.

“We’re counting one in five, averaged across the country, Rachel. We need—”

“You’re stuck way out in the middle of it, I hear. Looks like seventy plus percent rate of contagion,” Browning interrupted. “Aerosol vital for at least three hours. Horrendous. It’s outside of anyone’s control.”

“It’s slowing.”

“There aren’t many left to infect, not in the schools.”

“We could cut the losses to almost nothing with proper medical care,” Augustine said. “We need doctors and equipment.”

“The Ohio district director is a corrupt son of a bitch,” Browning said. “At least we can agree on that. He diverted medical supplies from school warehouses because the kids were so healthy. The rumor is some of his staffers sold the supplies for ten cents on the dollar to Russian bosses in Chicago, and now they’re on the black market in Moscow.”

“I did not know that,” Augustine said, tapping his fingernail on the desktop.

“You should have, Mark. Justice is moving in on little leopard feet,” Browning said. “That does not help you or the virus kids. Worse still, there are a lot of brown BVDs in Washington, Mark. They’re scared. So am I.”

“None of the adults here are ill. It is not a threat to us. We know the etiology and nature of the disease.” This was a lie, but he had to show some strength.

“If this illness has anything to do with ancient viruses, and I suspect it does—don’t you?—we’re going to full-blown biological emergency. PDD 298, Mark.”

It had been three years since Augustine had read the details of Presidential Decision Directive 298.

“Hayford has a crisis bill on the House floor now,” Browning continued. “No virus child will be tolerated outside a federal school. None. Not even on the reservations or in Utah. All schools will come under direct EMAC federal control. You’ll like that. The bill increases violation penalties and authorizes tripling the staff for interdiction and arrest. We’ll be hiring every fat security guard with a bigger gun than a dick, and every yahoo who ever failed cop school. They’ll double our budget, Mark.”

Augustine looked at his Rolex. “It’s eleven in the morning there,” he said. “Can anyone in Washington get doctors out here?”

“Not for a day, at least,” Browning said. “Everyone’s taking care of their own, and the governor of Ohio hasn’t asked yet. And, frankly, why should I trust you? You’ll help me best where you are—screwing everything up royally. But I don’t hold grudges. I’m here to offer some charity. I know where Kaye Lang will be hiding in a couple of hours. Do you?”

“No. I’ve been busy, Rachel.”

“I think you’re telling the truth.”

Augustine worked quickly through the possible ways Rachel Browning could have discovered such a thing as Kaye’s whereabouts. “You squeezed someone?”

“A GPS NuTest report out of Pittsburgh and neighbor complaints led us to a particular house. I got needed medical attention to a particular virus child at a school in Indiana. His parents are very happy. The doctors say he’s going to live, Mark.” Browning sounded ebullient, relating this tale of detection and shakedown.

“With so much power, I know you could help us here,” Augustine said.

“Honestly. I can’t. Did you hear that France offered to send in wide-spectrum antivirals, and President Ellington refused?”

“I did not.”

“All the precious beltway schools are well-supplied. Nobody raided their medical stores. And remember, Ohio did not go for Ellington, last election.”

Augustine pinched the bridge of his nose. He had had a headache for the last two hours, and it showed no signs of going away. “I hear no charity, Rachel. Why the call?”

“Because the shit that passes for opinion around here is starting to scare even me. I can’t get through to the NRO or NSA bosses. Secretary of Health and Human Services is unavailable. I think they’re all in conference in their secure little rabbit holes in Annapolis and Arlington. Mark, you know as well as I do that everyone in the House and Senate had their kids well before SHEVA. Only two senators and four representatives have SHEVA grandkids. Tough luck. Statistically it should be more. Sixty-four percent of our aging electorate favored shoot-on-sight policies against fugitive virus kids in a CNN-Gallup Poll yesterday evening. Two out of three, Mark.”

“How secure is this line, Rachel?” Augustine asked.

Browning made a sharp raspberry between her teeth. “Can you guess what’s coming down from the beltway?”

The headache pounded. He leaned over the desk. “All too easily.”

“Queen’s X, Mark?”

“Who’s Queen today?”

“That would be me. I’ll authorize a special pickup for Kaye Lang and her daughter. People I know and trust.”

Augustine thought this over for a few seconds. He had never been angrier in his life, or weaker. “I’m obliged, Rachel.”

He could hear the triumph in her voice. “I’m not as stupid as you think I am, Mark. Alive, she’s a pain in the ass. Dead, she’s a martyr.”

“Do what you can, Rachel.”

“I always do. No timetables, though. I’ll do this on my own schedule and tell you as little as possible.”

“All right.”

“If this works, you owe me, Mark. Now, here’s what—”

Abruptly, the phone died. He shook it and punched the on button several times. The phone flashed to life, but, receiving no signal, turned off again to conserve power.

Very likely, SRO had taken over the wireless networks and shut down cell towers around all the schools. First stage of PDD 298.

Augustine put the phone down just as DeWitt returned to the room.

“Dr. Dicken wants to see you,” she said. “They’ve found something.”

“Supplies?” Augustine asked hopefully.

DeWitt shook her head.

42

PENNSYLVANIA

On the state route, the traffic was light, three or four cars in the last fifteen minutes. Nobody wanted to be caught driving. Simply being out on the road would be suspicious. George had said the turnoff to the cabin was tricky, hard to see. He had nailed a red plastic strip to a large pine tree to mark the spot.

Mitch drove more slowly, looking for the red plastic strip and a wooden plaque that joy-riding vandals tended to splinter with ball bats.

Suddenly, the interior of the Jeep filled with shadow. He felt immersed in inky night. The sensation passed, but it scared him; he could almost smell the darkness, like crankcase oil.

“Too damned tired,” he told himself, and wondered whether they had heard him in the backseat. He could feel both of them back there, both alive, both quiet. Stella’s breathing had lost some of its harshness, but Mitch knew her fever was high.

Maybe he was coming down with it, too. That would be more than Kaye could stand, he suspected. So, I will not become sick.

Whistling in the dark. In the oily dark.

43

OHIO

“Jurie left the number codes in a desk drawer,” Middleton said as Augustine and DeWitt followed her into the concrete cube of the research building. “Dr. Dicken told me to bring you all here.”

Dicken came through the opposite door, carrying a thick folder of papers. He glared at Augustine. “You rotten son of a bitch,” he said.

Augustine took this without blinking. “You’ve found something,” he said.

“You’re goddamned right I’ve found something. How much did Americol pump into the schools? The camps?”

“To my knowledge, nothing.”

“You’re going to blame it all on Trask, right?”

Augustine shook his head cautiously. He looked around the big room and focused on the wall of steel refrigerators. “I don’t even know what it is.”

“What would Marge Cross want with all these children?” Dicken held out the folder. Augustine reached forward, leaning on his cane, and Dicken pulled it back, then dropped it on a desk next to the stainless steel cold storage units. Photographs spilled out: color photographs of autopsy proceedings. Even from a distance, it was obvious the subjects were children, some of them infants.

Dicken took a step away, as if too disgusted to let Augustine come near him.

Augustine shifted his eyes from face to face, facial lines deepening. He pushed aside the photos, then lifted the cover page on the folder and leafed through it.

“I know you too well,” Dicken said. “You wouldn’t be stupid enough to just let this happen.”

“Show me the rest,” Augustine said.

Middleton punched in the code numbers that unlocked the first stainless steel refrigerator door. Fog fell, revealing ranks of jars. Augustine immediately recognized the contents for what they were. The jars on top were small and contained anonymous meaty lumps in colorless fluid.

The jars below, on taller shelves, contained whole internal organs.

Middleton’s skin had faded to a sickly shade of olive, and her eyes were almost closed.

“How many?” Augustine asked.

“There’re the remains of maybe sixty or seventy children here, and more scattered throughout the building,” Dicken said.

“What do you think… what purpose?”

“I won’t even hazard a guess,” Dicken said.

“We never lost this many children,” Middleton said, “and Dr. Jurie… Dr. Pickman… left before…” She did not finish. She closed the first door and opened the second. Trays of thousands of frozen tissue samples, mounted on slides or stored in solution in smaller bottles, had been stacked to the top of the compartment.

Augustine surveyed the trays, then stepped forward and motioned for Middleton to open the third door, and the fourth. His cane made rubbery squeaks on the linoleum floor. “You’re positive none of these were from the last two days,” he said, grasping at some reasonable explanation for all the jars and tubes and dishes sealed, neatly numbered, and marked with yellow-and-red biohazard labels.

“It’s a tissue library,” Dicken said. “Healthy tissue, pathological specimens, whatever they could get. There’s a fully equipped laboratory for analyzing them. Jurie and Pickman autopsied all the children who died at this school, and all the schools in this region. I presume they were bringing the dead here from wherever they could get them,” Dicken said. “A central clearing house for cadavers.”

“Cross paid for the equipment?” Augustine asked. His demeanor was so quiet, his expression so utterly devastated, that Dicken pushed back his anger.

“Americol,” he said.

“Mm hm,” Augustine said. He took the list of codes from Middleton and unlocked and examined the next three doors. Two contained the by now familiar stacked trays of specimens. The last contained five cadavers, wrapped in transparent plastic, suspended by hooks and slings from rails at the top of the compartment.

“My God,” DeWitt said.

“I should have known,” Augustine murmured. “That’s certain. I should have known.”

Middleton approached the open compartment. “Autopsies would be standard, wouldn’t they? Is that what we’re looking at, a pathology study being done on behalf of the students, to protect them?”

“No,” Augustine said abruptly. “No studies were ever passed up to Washington, and I doubt they were even sent to the Ohio Central authority, or I would have heard of it. Before this week began, a total of three hundred and seventy-nine children in custody of the schools have died. Very low mortality, statistically speaking. Many of them are probably here. They were supposed to be returned to their families or buried if left unclaimed.” Augustine closed the door. “I did not authorize this.”

Dicken stepped forward. “Was there any value to the children in doing this… research?”

“I don’t know,” Augustine said. “Possibly. Doubtful, however. Anatomically, the children are so much like us that storage of organs or whole cadavers for research never seemed strictly necessary. Biopsies and specific tissue samples from the dead were all I ever authorized. You would have done the same.”

Dicken admitted this with a quick nod.

“This implies some sort of large-scale morbidity study. Whole body assessments, thousands of tissue analyses… I need to sit down.”

DeWitt brought a chair. Augustine slumped into it and leaned forward, shaking his head. “I’m trying to make sense of it,” he said.

“Try harder,” Dicken urged.

“I know of no reason other than retrovirus expression,” Augustine said. “Tracking expression of novel HERV in the new children. A statistical sampling of expression in dozens or hundreds of individuals, correlated with known biographies, stress patterns. That would require an unprecedented effort. Monumental.”

“To what end?”

“It could be an attempt to understand the whole process. What the ancient viruses are up to. What dangers they might present.”

“To predict incidence of Shiver?” Dicken asked. “That’s being done elsewhere. Why do it here, unauthorized?”

“Because nowhere else do they have access to so many new children, dead or alive,” Augustine said.

“This is making me sick,” DeWitt said, and leaned on the small desk, pushing aside the folder.

Augustine looked up at Dicken. “I’m not the puppet master, Christopher. They broke me in the ranks months ago. I’ve been trying to keep whatever responsibility was left to me in order to maintain some sense of order.” He waved his arm feebly at the stainless steel doors. “People died, Christopher.”

“That’s what Marian Freedman said, last time I visited Fort Detrick. Some excuse. Anything goes. You’re not the bad guy here?” Dicken asked.

“Were they bad guys, really?” Augustine asked. “Do we know that?”

“What about the parents?” DeWitt asked.

“Sentiment must be considered,” Augustine said. “Medical ethics should prevail even in an emergency. But we’ve never faced this kind of problem before.”

Dicken took Augustine’s arm and lifted him to his feet. “One last bit of evidence,” he said.

Augustine walked slowly through the benches in the molecular biology lab, taking in the collection of expensive machinery with impassivity, long past the possibility of surprise. Dicken opened the hatch at the back of the lab and switched on the fluorescent lights, revealing a long, narrow room. All hesitated before entering.

Steel shelves reaching to the ceiling held hundreds of long cardboard boxes. Dicken pulled out one and opened the hinged lid. Within were bones: femurs, tagged and arranged according to size. Another box held phalanges. Bigger boxes on the lower right, none more than four feet in length, held complete skeletons.

Augustine leaned against the edge of the frame. “There’s nothing I can do here,” he said. “Nothing any of us can do.”

“This isn’t all,” Dicken said. “There’s an upper floor. It’s still locked.”

“What do you think they keep up there?” DeWitt asked, her face ashen.

“No excuses, Christopher,” Augustine said. “We should not forget this, but what in hell does anger do for us, now? For the sick children?”

“Not a goddamned thing,” Dicken admitted. “Let’s go.”

44

THE POCONOS, PENNSYLVANIA

Eleven in the morning, the dashboard display said. Mitch looked left on the two-lane asphalt road and saw, about a hundred feet ahead, the red plastic strip hanging on a big old pine. He slowed and rolled down the window.

The signpost was still standing, though it had been knocked askew. The wooden plaque read:

Mitch got out, unlocked the pipe, and pushed it back through its iron hoop. He took the plaque down from the signpost and stashed it in the back of the Jeep.

The cabin was made of whole stripped logs just beginning to gray with exposure. It sat on the shore of a private half-acre lake, alone in the pines. The air was scented by pine needles and dry dirt. Mitch could smell the moisture from the lake, the greenness of shallows filled with reeds. Sunlight slanted down through the trees onto the Jeep, illuminating Kaye in the backseat.

Mitch walked up onto the porch, his heavy shoes clomping on the wood. He unlocked the door, deactivated the burglar alarm with the six-number code, then returned to the Jeep.

Kaye was already halfway up the walk from the driveway, carrying Stella.

“Get a bag of Ringer’s and set up an IV,” she said. “A lamp hook, flowerpot hook, anything. I’ll spread some blankets.” She carried Stella into the cabin. The air inside was cool and sweetly stuffy.

Mitch spread a sleeping bag on the floor behind a big leather couch and took down an empty hanging pot, then slung the bag of Ringer’s solution, inserted the long, clear plastic tube into the bag, opened the butterfly clamp, let the clear fluid push through the tube and drip from the needle. Kaye lay Stella on the bag, tapped her arm to bring up a vein, poked in the needle, strapped it to the girl’s arm with medical tape.

Stella could barely move.

“She should be in a hospital,” Kaye said, kneeling beside her daughter.

Mitch looked down on them both, hands opening and closing helplessly. “In a better world,” he said.

“There is no goddamned better world,” Kaye said. “Never has been, never will be. There’s just ‘suffer the little children.’”

“That’s not what that means,” Mitch said.

“Screw it, then,” Kaye said. “I hope I know what the hell I’m doing.”

“Her head hurts,” Mitch said.

“She has aseptic meningitis. I’m going to bring the swelling down with prednisone, treat those mouth sores with famicyclovir.”

They had found the famicyclovir, medical tape, and other supplies in a small drugstore near the pet hospital. Kaye had also managed to score a box of disposable syringes. Her excuses had worn thin at the last. She had told the pharmacist, perched in his little elevated booth in the back of the store, that she was using the needles for a cloth dyeing project.

That would not have gone over well in the big city.

She prepared to give Stella an injection.

“I’m not even sure about the dose,” she murmured.

Mitch was half convinced he could walk out the door, drive off, and Kaye would never notice he was gone. He looked at his hands, smooth from lack of digging. How had this happened? He knew, he remembered, but none of it seemed real. Even the shadow of grief—was that what he had felt in the Jeep?—even that seemed unimportant.

Mitch could feel his soul winking down to nothing.

The drip of lactated Ringer’s slid down the long plastic tube.

“I’ll watch her,” he said.

“Get some sleep,” Kaye said. She slipped the used syringe needle into its plastic cap for disposal.

“You first,” he said.

“Get some sleep, damn it,” Kaye said, and her glance up at him was like the slap of a flat, dull knife.

45

OHIO

“It begins,” Augustine said. “I’ve dreaded this day for years.”

Standing in the number two tower, surrounded by stacked boxes, dusty old desks, and outdated desktop computers, Augustine and Dicken—and Augustine’s ever-vigilant agent—watched the Ohio National Guard troops set up their perimeter and cut off the school’s entrance. Their view encompassed the main road, the water tower to the west, a barren gravel field broken by lozenges of bare concrete, a line of scrub oaks beyond that, and a state highway slicing through low grassy hills.

DeWitt climbed up the last flight of steps and leaned against the wall, out of breath. DeWitt nodded. “Governor’s office called… the director’s line. The governor is jumping ahead… of the feds and declaring,” she sucked in her breath with a small whoop, “a stage five public health emergency. We’re under complete quarantine. Nobody in or out… Not even you, Dr. Augustine.” She nailed him with a glare. “Main gate reports twenty more… National Guard trucks… moving in. They’re surrounding the school.”

Augustine turned to the Secret Service agent, who tapped his earpiece and made a wry face. “We’re in for the duration,” the agent affirmed.

“What about the supplies?” DeWitt asked.

“They can drop them off at the entrance and we can send someone to pick them up, no contact,” Dicken said. “But they have to get here first.”

Augustine seemed less hopeful. “Not difficult to isolate us,” he said dryly. “It’s a prison to start with. As for supplies—they’ll have to go through state lines, state inspection. The state can intercept them and hold them. The governor will try to protect his votes, act ignorant, and shift our supplies to the big cities, the rich neighborhoods, the most visible and well-funded hospitals with the loudest administrators. Stockpile against a potential plague.”

“Leave us with nothing? I can’t believe they’ll be that stupid,” DeWitt said. “They’ll have a revolt.”

“By whom? The parents?” Dicken asked. “They’ll hunker down and hope for the best. Dr. Augustine made sure of that years ago.”

Augustine looked through the tower window and did not take Dicken’s bait. “All it takes to get elected in twenty-first-century America is a mob of frightened sheep and a wolf with a nice smile,” he said softly. “We have plenty of sheep. Ms. DeWitt, could I speak with Christopher in private, please? But stay close.”

DeWitt looked between them, not knowing what to think, and then left, closing the door behind her.

“It’s worse than any of them can imagine,” Augustine said, his voice low. “I think the starting pistol has been fired.”

“You mentioned that in the car. What in hell does it mean?”

“If we’re lucky, the president can put a stop to it… But I do not know Ellington. He’s kept his distance ever since he was elected. I do not know what he will do.”

“Put a stop to what?”

“If the situation gets any worse, I believe the governor will call Washington and ask for permission to clean up the schools. Sterilize the premises. He may ask for sanction to kill the children.”

Dicken stood up. “You have got to be shitting me.”

Augustine shook his head and looked him steadily in the eye. “State autonomous self-protection, as specified under Presidential Decision Directive 298, Emergency Action Gray Book. It’s called the Military and Biological Security Protocol, Part Four. It was enacted seven years ago during a secret session of the Senate oversight committee. It gives discretion to state authorities on the scene to use all necessary force, under well-defined emergency conditions.”

“Why was I never told?”

“Because you chose to stay a soldier. The contents of the directive are confidential. At any rate, I opposed the rule as extreme, but there were a lot of scared senators in the room. They were shown pictures of Mrs. Rhine’s family, incidents of Shiver in Mexico. They saw pictures of you, Christopher. The statute was signed by the president, and has never been revoked.”

“Is there any chance they’ll listen to reason?”

“Slim to none. But we have to try. The race is on. You have work to do, and so do I.” He raised his voice. “Ms. DeWitt?”

DeWitt opened the door. As requested, she had not gone far; Augustine wondered if she had heard anything.

“I want to talk to Toby Smith.”

“Why?” DeWitt asked, as if the thought of Augustine seeing the boy again disgusted her.

“We’re going to need their help,” he said.

“They’re hardly trained for this sort of thing,” Dicken said, following Augustine down the concrete stairs. His voice echoed from the hard gray walls.

“You’d be surprised,” Augustine said. “We need answers by tomorrow. Is that possible?”

“I don’t know.” Dicken was amazed at the transformation. This was the old Mark Augustine, jerked back to life like some sort of political zombie. His skin was regaining color, his eyes were hard, and the perpetual grimace of determination had returned.

“If we don’t have answers by then, they could move in and kill us all.”

Dicken, Augustine, Middleton, DeWitt, Kelson, and Toby Smith gathered in Trask’s office.

Toby stood before Augustine with a paper cup of water in one hand. Behind him stood Dr. Kelson and the two remaining school police officers. The officers wore surgical masks. The doctor did not seem to care very much whether he was protected.

“Toby, we’re short staffed,” Augustine said.

“Yeah,” Toby said.

“And we have a lot of sick people to take care of. All of them your friends.”

Toby looked around the office. The square, metal-framed windows let in the bright afternoon sun and a whiff of warm air that smelled of the miles of dry grass beyond the compound.

“How many students are healthy enough to help us do some work around here?”

“A few,” Toby said. “We’re all tired. Pretty koobered.”

“Koobered?”

“A word,” Toby said, squinting at Dicken, then looking around the room at the others.

“They have a lot of words,” DeWitt said. “Most are special to this school.”

“We think,” Kelson added, and scratched his arm through the sleeve, then looked around to see if anyone had caught him doing this. “I’m fine,” he said to Dicken. “Dry skin.”

“What does ‘koobered’ mean?” Augustine asked Toby.

“Not important,” Toby said.

“Okay. But we’re going to spend a lot of time together, if that’s all right with you. I’d like to learn these words, if you’re willing to teach me.”

Toby shrugged.

“Can you put some teams together and pick up some basic nursing skills from the doctors, from Ms. Middleton and the teachers?”

“I guess,” Toby said.

“Some of them are already doing that in the gym and in the infirmary,” Middleton said. “Helping keep kids comfortable, deliver water.”

Augustine smiled. He had pulled himself together, straightened his rumpled shirt and pants, washed his face in Trask’s executive bathroom sink. “Thanks, Yolanda. I’m speaking with Toby now, and I want him to tell me what’s what. Toby?”

“I’m not the best at doing that kind of stuff. Not even the best who’s still up and standing around.”

“Who is?”

“Four or five of us, maybe. Six, if you count Natasha.”

“Are you fever-scenting, Toby?” Middleton asked. “Do I have to strap on my sachet again?”

“I’m just seeing if I can, Ms. Middleton,” Toby said.

Augustine recognized the chocolate-like scent. Toby was nervous. “I’m glad you’re feeling better, Toby, but we all need to think clearly.”

“Sorry.”

“I’d like for you to represent me and Mr. Dicken and all the school staff, okay? And ask the right kids—the right individuals—to put together teams for more training. Ms. Middleton will help us train, and Dr. Kelson. Toby, can these teams become clouded?”

Toby smiled, one pupil growing larger, the other shrinking. The gold flecks in both irises seemed to move.

“Probably,” Toby said. “But I think you mean we should cloud. Join up.”

“Of course. Sorry. Can you help us learn who’s going to get better and who isn’t?”

“Yes,” Toby said, very serious now, and both irises large.

Augustine turned to Dicken. “I think that’s where we should begin. We’re not going to get any help from outside, no deliveries, nothing. We’re cut off. As far as the children are concerned, we need to focus our efforts and our supplies on those for whom we can do the most good with what we have. The children are better equipped to determine that than we are. Is this clear, Toby?”

Toby nodded slowly.

“I don’t like giving children such decisions,” Middleton said, eyes thinning. “They are very loyal to each other.”

“If we do nothing, more will die. This thing is going through the new children like a crown fire. It’s spreading by breath and touch—aerosol.”

“What’s that mean for us?” Dr. Kelson asked, looking between Dicken and Augustine.

“I don’t think we’ll catch it from the kids unless we engage in really stupid behavior—pick our noses, that sort of thing,” Dicken said, glancing at Augustine. Damn him, he’s pulling us together. “The aerosol forms of the viruses are probably not infectious for us.”

“It has a smell,” Toby volunteered. “When it’s in the air it smells like soot spread over snow. When someone is going to get sick, and maybe die, they smell like lemons and ham. When they’re going to get sick but not die, they smell like mustard and onions. Some of us just smell like water and dust. We won’t get sick. That’s a good, safe smell.”

“What do you smell like, Toby?”

Toby shrugged. “I’m not sick.”

Augustine gripped Toby’s shoulder. “You’re our guy,” he said.

Toby returned his stare without expression, but his cheeks flared.

“Let’s start,” Augustine said.

“It’s come to them saving themselves,” DeWitt said, finding the logic bitter. “God help us all.”

46

PENNSYLVANIA

The woods became dark and still. The rooms inside the cabin were quiet, stuffy from months of being closed up. Beneath the table lamp in the living room, Stella Nova shuddered at the end of each exhale of breath, but her lungs were not congested, and the air did not go in and out of her with the harsh whicker Kaye had heard earlier.

She changed the bag of Ringer’s. Stella still did not awaken. Kaye stooped beside her daughter, listening and watching, then straightened. She looked around the cabin, seeing for the first time the homey and decorative touches, the carefully chosen personal items of the Mackenzie family. On an end table, a silver frame with characters from Winnie-the-Pooh in bas-relief held a picture of George and Iris and their son, Kelly, perhaps three years younger than Stella at the time the picture was taken.

To some, all the new children looked alike. People chose the simplest markers to differentiate between one another. Some people, Kaye had learned, were little more than social drones, going through the motions of being human beings, like little automatons, and teaching these people to see Stella and her kind with any sense of discrimination or understanding was almost impossible.

She hated that amorphous mob, lined up in her imagination like an endless army of unthinking robots, all intent on misunderstanding, hurting, killing.

Kaye checked Stella once again, found her signs steady if not improving, then walked from room to room to find her husband. Mitch sat on the porch in an Adirondack chair, facing the lake, eyes fixed on a point between two big pines. The fading light of dusk made him look sallow and drained.

“How are you?” Kaye asked.

“I’m fine,” Mitch said. “How’s Stella?”

“Resting. The fever is steady, but not dangerous.”

“Good,” Mitch said. His hands gripped the ends of the square wooden armrests. Kaye surveyed those hands with a sudden and softening sense of nostalgia. Big, square knuckles, long fingers. Once, simply looking at Mitch’s hands would have made her horny.

“I think you’re right,” Kaye said.

“About what?”

“Stella’s going to be okay. Unless there’s another crisis.”

Mitch nodded. Kaye looked at his face, expecting relief. He just kept nodding.

“We can take turns sleeping,” Kaye suggested.

“I won’t sleep,” Mitch said. “If I sleep, someone will die. I have to stay awake and watch everything. Otherwise, you’ll blame me.”

This astonished Kaye, to the extent she even had enough energy to feel astonished. “I’m sorry, what?”

“You were angry with me for being in Washington when Stella ran away.”

“I was not.”

“You were furious.”

“I was upset.”

“I can’t betray you. I can’t betray Stella. I’m going to lose both of you.”

“Please talk sense. That is loony, Mitch.”

“Tell me that’s not exactly how you felt, because I was away when it began.”

Why did the burden rest upon her? How often had Mitch been away, and Stella had decided it was time to pull something, to challenge, stretch, reach out and test? “I was stressed out,” Kaye said.

“I’ve never blamed you. I’ve tried to do everything you wanted me to do, and be everything I’ve needed to be.”

“I know,” Kaye said.

“Then cut me some slack.” At another time, those words might have hit Kaye like a slap, but his voice was so drained and desperate, they felt more like the brush of a wind-blown curtain. “Your instincts are no stronger than mine. Just because you are a woman and a mother does not give you the right to…” He waved a hand helplessly. “Go off on me.”

“I did not ‘go off on you,’” Kaye said, but she knew she had, and felt defensively that she did indeed have that right. Yet the way Mitch was behaving, the words he was saying, scared her. He had never been one to complain or to criticize. She could not remember having this sort of conversation in their twelve years of being together.

“I feel things as strongly as you,” Mitch said.

Kaye sat on the chair arm, nudging his elbow inward. He folded his arm across his chest. “I know,” she said. “I’m sorry.”

“I’m sorry, too,” Mitch said. “I know it isn’t the right time to talk like this.” His breath hitched. He was trying to hold back sobs. “But right now I feel like curling up and dying.”

Kaye leaned over to kiss the top of his head. His face was cold and hard under her fingers, as if he were already in some other place, dead to her. Her heart started to beat faster.

Mitch cleared his throat. “There’s this voice in my head, and it says over and over again, ‘You are not fit to be a father.’ If that’s true, the only option is to die.”

“Shush,” Kaye said, very cautiously.

“If I go to sleep, I’ll let something get in. A little crack. Something will creep in and kill my family.”

“The hell with that,” she said, again gently, softly, as if her breath might shatter him. “We’re tough. We’ll make it. Stella’s doing better.”

“I’m tapped out. Broken.”

“Shush, please. You are strong, I know you are, and I apologize if I’ve been acting stupid. It’s the situation, Mitch. Don’t be hard on either of us.”

He shook his head, clearly unconvinced. “I need you to tuck me in,” he said, his voice hollow. “Put me in that big bed and pull up the frilly sheets and kiss me on the cheek and say good night. I’ll be all right in a little while. Just wake me if Stella has a problem, or if you need me.”

“All right,” Kaye said. She felt an immense sadness as he looked up and met her eyes.

“I try all the time,” he said. “I give you both all I have, all the time.”

“I know.”

“Without you and Stella, I am a dead man. You know that.”

“I know.”

“Don’t break me, Kaye.”

“I won’t. I promise.”

He stood. Kaye took his hand and led him into the bedroom like a frightened boy or an old, old man. She pulled back the down comforter and the blanket and top sheet. Mitch unbuttoned his shirt and removed his pants and stood by the side of the bed, lost.

“Just lie down and get some rest,” she said.

“Wake me if Stella gets any worse,” Mitch said. “I want to see her and tell her I love her.” He looked at her, eyes unfocused. Kaye tucked the sheets in around him, her heart thumping. She kissed him on the cheek. No tears, his face cold and hard as stone, all Mitch’s blood flowing away to somewhere far from her, taking him to where she could not go.

“I love you,” Kaye said. “I believe in you. I believe in what we’ve done.”

His eyes focused on hers, then, and she felt embarrassed at the power she had over this large, strong man. The blood returned to his face, and his lips came alive under hers.

Then, like a light going out, he was asleep.

Kaye stood beside the bed and watched Mitch, eyes wide. Her chest felt wrapped in steel bands. She was as frightened as if she had just missed driving them all off a cliff. She stood vigil over him for as long as she could before she had to leave and check on Stella. She hated the conflict, husband or daughter, but went with her judgment and the nature inside her, and crossed the few steps into the living room.

The cabin was completely dark.

“What?”

Kaye sat up on the floor. She had fallen asleep beside Stella, with only the flap of the sleeping bag between her and the hard wood, and now she had the distinct impression someone other than her daughter was in the room.

It wasn’t Mitch. She could see the blanketed hill of his toes through the bedroom door.

“Who’s there?” she whispered.

Crickets and frogs outside, a couple of large flies buzzing around the cabin.

She switched on a table lamp, checked her daughter for the hundredth time, found the fever way down, the breathing more regular.

She thought about moving Stella into the second bedroom, but the hook supporting the bag of Ringer’s solution would have to be moved as well, and Stella seemed comfortable on the sleeping bag, as comfortable as she would have been in a bed.

Kaye looked in on Mitch. He, too, was sleeping quietly. For a few minutes, Kaye stood in the short, narrow hallway, then leaned against the wall. “It’s better,” she said to the shadows. “It has got to be better.”

She turned suddenly. For a moment, she had thought she might see someone in the hall, someone beloved and familiar. Her father.

Dad is dead. Mom is dead. I’m an orphan. All the family I have is in this house.

She rubbed her forehead and neck. Her muscles were so tense, not least from sleeping beside Stella on the wooden floor. Her sinuses felt congested, as if she had been crying. It was a peculiar, not unpleasant sensation; the byproduct of some deeply buried emotion.

She needed to get some air. She checked Stella again, obsessive; knelt to touch her daughter’s forehead and feel her pulse, then walked around the couch, through the porch door, down the steps, and across the path through the grass to the boat dock.

The dock was thirty feet long and ten feet wide, ridiculously large on such a small lake. It supported a single overturned rowboat and a pile of moldy life vests. Grass blades poked out of the vests, shimmering in the moonlight.

Kaye stood at the end of the dock and crossed her arms. Absorbed the night. Crickets stroked out the degrees of heat, frogs thrummed with sexy, alien dignity out there in the shallows, among the reeds. Gnats hummed their desperate little ditties.

“Do any of you know what it is to be sad?” Kaye asked the lake and its inhabitants, then looked back toward the house. “Are you sad when your children are ill?” The single lamp in the living room burned golden through the windows of the porch.

She closed her eyes. Something large, completing a connection… something huge passing over, sweeping the lake, the forest—touching all the living things around her.

The frogs fell silent.

And touching her.

Kaye jumped as if someone had cracked through a flimsy wooden wall. Her shoulders rose and her fingers tensed. “Hello?” she whispered.

Any neighbors were at least a mile away, up the road, beyond the thick trees. She saw nothing, heard nothing.

“Wow,” she said, and immediately felt stupid. She looked around the lake, toward the reedy shallows, searching for the source of another voice, though no one had spoken. The reeds were empty. The lake fell silent, not even a breath of air. The night was so still Kaye could hear her heart beating in her chest.

Something had touched her, not her skin, deeper. At first it was just the awareness that she was not alone. By herself, on the dock, in her bare feet, she now shared her space with someone as real as she—as welcome and strangely familiar as a beloved friend.

She felt years of burden lift. For a moment, she basked in a warm sensation of infinite reprieve.

No judgment. No punishment.

Kaye shivered. Her tongue moved over her lips. A trickle of silvery water seemed to run through her head. The trickle became a rivulet, then an insistent creek flowing down the back of her neck into her chest. It was cool and electric and pure, like stepping out of the sweltering heat of a summer day into an underground spring. But this spring spoke, though never with words. It had a particular and distinctive perfume, like astringent flowers.

It was alive, and she could not shake the feeling that she had known about it all along. Like molecules finally fitting, making a whole—yet not. Nothing biological whatsoever. Something other.

Kaye touched her forehead. “Am I having a stroke?” she whispered. She fingered her lips. They were trying to form a smile. She bent them straight. “I can’t be weak. Not now. Who’s there?” she repeated, as if locked into a pointless ritual.

She knew the answer.

The visitor, the caller, possessed no features, no face or form. Nevertheless, being bathed in this cool, lovely fount was like having all of her great-grandmothers, her great-grandfathers, all the wise and sweet and wonderful and powerful members of her family whom she had never met, all at once and together bestowing the unconditional approval and love they would have bestowed had they cradled her as an infant in their sheltering arms. There was that much in it, and more.

But the caller, at once gentle and unbelievably intense, was nothing like her fleshly kin.

“Please, not now,” she begged. With relief came fear that she was losing her tenuous link to reality. The caller was known to her, yet long denied and evaded; but it showed no anger, no resentment. Its only response to her long denial was unconditional sympathy.

Yet was there also trepidation? The caller exposed an extraordinary longing to touch and show itself despite all the rules, the dangers. The caller quite charmingly yearned.

Kaye suddenly opened her mouth and let air fill her lungs. Funny, that she had stopped breathing for a moment. Funny, and not scary at all; like a personal joke. “Hello,” she said with the exhale, dropping her shoulders and relaxing, pushing aside the doubts and giving up to the sensation. She wanted this to last forever. She knew already it could not. To go back to the way she had felt just a few minutes ago, and all of her life before that, would hurt.

But she knew the pain was necessary. The world was not done with her, and the caller wanted her to be free to make her own choices, without its addictive interference.

Kaye walked back to the cabin to check on the sleeping Stella and to look in on Mitch. Both were quiet. Stella’s color seemed to be stronger. Patches of freckles came and went on her cheeks. She was definitely past the crisis.

Kaye returned to the dock and stood staring into the early-morning forest, hoping that the loveliness, the peace, would never leave. She wanted it all, now and forever. There had been so much grief and pain and fear.

But despite her own yearning, Kaye understood.

Can’t go on. Not yet. Miles to go before I sleep.

Then, she lost track of time.

Dawn arrived in the east, on the other side of the trees, like gray velvet by candlelight.

She stood beside the overturned rowboat, shivering. How long had it been since she had returned to the dock?

Without words, the fount had spent hours sluicing her soul, (she was not comfortable using that word but there it was), wetting and revealing dusty thoughts and memories, becoming reacquainted in real and human time. Wherever it flowed, she knew its unalloyed delight.

It found her very good.

“Is Stella going to be all right?” Kaye asked, her voice soft as a child’s in the shaded close of the trees. “Are we all going to be together and well again?”

No response came to these specific questions. The caller did not deal in knowledge, as such, but it did not resent being asked.

She had never imagined such a moment, such a relationship. The few times she had wondered at all what this experience might be like, as a girl, she had conceived of it as guilt and thunder, recrimination, being assigned onerous tasks: a moment of desperate self-deception, justifying years of ignorance and misbegotten faith. She had never imagined anything so simple. Certainly not this intense yet amused upwelling of friendship.

No judgment. No punishment.

And no answers.

I did not call for this. The body has prayed the prayers of desperate flesh, not me.

Her conscious and discerning mind, most concerned with practicalities, the mistress in starched skirts who stared out sternly over Kaye’s life, told her, “You’re playing Ouija with your brain. It doesn’t make sense. This is going to mean nothing but trouble.”

And then, as if it were shouting a kind of curse, Kaye’s tense and adult voice flew to the trees, “You are having an epiphany.”

The crickets and frogs started their racket again, answering.

Finally, the conflict became too much. She dropped slowly to her knees on the dock, feeling that she carried precious cargo, it must not spill. She bent over and laid her hands flat on the rough, weathered wood.

She had to lie down to keep from falling over. With a long, slow release of breath, Kaye stretched out her legs.

47

OHIO

Augustine had divided them into two teams, the first with eight students, the second with seven. Toby’s team had worked first, from ten in the evening until three in the morning. Teachers and nurses carried those chosen by the team to an exercise field, laying them in rows under the blue glare of tall pole lamps, in the warm early-morning air.

Silently—with little more than a touch of palms and a whiff behind each ear—Toby passed his duties to a girl named Fiona, and the first team fell onto cots laid out in Trask’s office.

Fiona and the others on the second team went out with Augustine, back down the steel stairs to the main floor.

Until dawn, Fiona and the six helped Augustine sort through other buildings, walking up to each child on the cots or on bedding spread over concrete or wood floors, on bunks in the former cells and in the dormitories; bending over and smelling above the heads of the sick, showing with one finger, or two, who was strongest, who would probably live another day.

One finger meant the child was likely to die.

After eight hours of work, they had processed about six hundred children, starting with the worst, and consequently, had already visited the most dead and dying, and the children on both teams were quiet and tired.

More children volunteered, forming a third, fourth, and fifth team. Toby did not object, nor did Augustine.

While the first two teams slept, the new teams examined another nine hundred children, separating out four hundred, most of them able to walk with the teachers to the field, where they were assigned to old tents marked “Inmate Overflow.”

And round into the dawn and beyond ten o’clock, the kids worked with the remaining teachers, nurses, and security officers—the bravest of the brave—carrying bodies wrapped in sheets or in the last remaining body bags, or even in doubled plastic garbage bags, out to the farthest area within the fence, the employee parking lot, where the dead were laid out between the few and scattered cars.

Middleton worked to rearrange accommodations so that they could set up a morgue in the main gymnasium, adjacent to the infirmary. By eleven, the bodies had been removed from the parking lot and placed out of the sun.

Augustine estimated they had perhaps ten or fifteen hours before the dead would become a horrible nuisance, and twenty before they became a health hazard.

At noon, Augustine fell over after stumbling, half-blind with exhaustion, between a row of inmate tents. The children carried him back to the infirmary, with the help of DeWitt.

There, DeWitt fed Augustine a little canned soup, gave him some water. He said he was feeling better and went back out with the rested first team.

All through the morning and afternoon, their labors were watched by rows of stone-faced National Guard troops patrolling beyond the razor wire perimeter fences.

At two in the afternoon, Augustine was compelled once again to go up to the office and lie down. Dicken emerged from the research lab with another bag full of specimen kits and met him there.

Four children who had worked with the teams slept in the corner, arms around each other, snoring lightly.

Dicken looked down on his former boss. Augustine was trembling, but his face had lost that distant, defeated look.

“You are a surprising fellow, Mark,” Dicken admitted.

“Not really,” Augustine croaked. He touched his throat. “Sorry. My voice is shot. How’s the lab work going?”

“Your turn,” Dicken said, and bent down to draw blood. When he was finished, he had Augustine scrape a plastic depressor on his tongue, and sealed that into a little plastic bag.

“Anything conclusive?” Augustine asked.

“Still getting specimens from the staff.”

“What next?”

“I’m going out into the field with Toby. Carry on while you rest. Can’t let an old bastard like you act the humanitarian all by your lonesome.”

Augustine nodded. “Conversion of Saul. Go forth,” he advised piously, and crossed the air between them.

Dicken stretched. His whole body felt stiff.

Augustine rolled on his side. “I’m not doing this out of pure charity, I confess,” he murmured. Dicken bent over to hear the soft words. “I have done a nasty thing, Christopher. I have played a card I vowed I would never play, to give my enemies—our enemies—the rope I need to hang them all.”

“What card?” Dicken said.

“I’m still a bastard. But I do begin to understand them, Christopher.”

“The children?”

“All our sweet little albatrosses.”

“Good for you,” Dicken said, his neck hair prickling, and turned to leave.

48

PENNSYLVANIA

The sun was high in the sky when Kaye raised her head. She might have slept for another hour or two; she did not remember.

She rolled over on the dock.

It’s gone, she said. It was a dream. Or worse.

She stood and brushed off her jeans, prepared to feel a resigned sadness. I should get a checkup. There’s been so much stress… Her nose and forehead still felt stuffy. Was that a symptom of embolism or a burst aneurysm? Had wires crossed in her head, pouring signals from one side of the brain to the other? A short circuit?

She turned to look back along the dock at the house, took a step…

And let out a squeak like a surprised mouse. She stretched out her arms.

The presence was still with her. Quiet, calm, other; patient and real. At the same time Kaye was relieved and terrified.

She ran to the cabin. Mitch knelt on the floor beside Stella. He looked up as she came through the porch door. His hair was tousled and his face looked like a rumpled rag.

“Her fever’s gone, I think,” Mitch said, searching Kaye’s features. His brows twitched. “The spots are smaller. The spots on her butt are gone.”

Stella rolled over. Her cheeks had regained more of their color. The sleeping bag was gone, and in its place Mitch had laid out an air mattress covered with a bright yellow sheet and a lime green blanket.

Kaye stared at them both. Her hands hung by her sides, her shoulders slumped.

“Are you all right?” Mitch asked.

Stella rubbed her eyes and reached out to Kaye. Their fingers touched and Kaye moved in and gripped her hand.

“You smell different,” Stella said.

Kaye bent down and hugged her daughter as fiercely as she dared.

“She’s asleep again.” Mitch rejoined Kaye in the cabin’s small, neat kitchen. “She looks better, doesn’t she?”

“Yes. Much.” Kaye bit the inside of her lip and glanced at her husband. “The Mackenzies laid in a wide selection of teas,” she said. She opened the box of teabags, confused, desperate.

Mitch returned her look, patient but tired. “Does she need more medicine?”

“Her neck doesn’t hurt. Her head doesn’t hurt. She’s not feverish. I removed the needle because she drank some orange juice. I don’t think she’ll need any more antiviral.”

“She wet the sleeping bag.”

“I know. Thank you for changing it.”

“You were on the dock. You were asleep.”

Kaye looked out the kitchen window at the dock, now bright in the full sun. “You should have awakened me.”

“You looked peaceful. I’m sorry if I said anything strange last night.”

“You?” She laughed and fumbled the box of tea bags, picked up the spilled ones, then took down two mugs from a rack over the kitchen window. One mug said Kiss a Clown, You Know You Want to. The other was from Smith College, gold emblem of a gate on dark blue. “Not at all,” Kaye murmured, and filled a kettle with water. Somewhere, a pump started chuckling, and the water jerked from the tap, finally flowing in a steady stream. She swished her hand back and forth, fingers spreading through the coldness.

Not at all the same.

“How are we, Kaye?” Mitch asked, standing beside her at the sink.

“Stella is going to be fine,” Kaye said before she could think.

“How are we, Kaye?”

Kaye reached out and gripped Mitch’s hand on the counter. She had not spent much time lately simply touching her husband. He had been gone so much, and so often, of course.

She must have looked miserable and lost. But what she felt was very, very physical.

Mitch pulled her close. He was always the one to make the first move; except that she had made the move that had produced Stella. Mitch had held back, worried about Kaye, or perhaps just scared at the thought of being a parent to a new kind of human being. They had been so in love, and the problem was, Kaye could not answer Mitch’s question now, not truthfully, because she did not know.

There was still love. What kind of love? “We are going to be better,” she said into his shoulder. “There is certainly better to be.”

“They shouldn’t hound us,” he said with the boyish sternness of the night before.

“I don’t think we have any control over that.”

“We won’t stay here long,” he said, and glared out the window at the woods, the dock, the sunshine. “This place is too nice. I don’t trust it.”

“It is nice. Why not stay a while? The Mackenzies would never tell anyone.”

Mitch brushed her cheek with his palm. “Their son is in a camp. The children in the camps are getting sick.”

Kaye drew her eyebrows together. She could not follow this line of reasoning.

“Mark Augustine has been looking for you, for us. He’s been waiting for the right moment to reel us in. The illness is scaring people badly. This is his moment.”

Kaye squeezed his forearm hard, as if to punish him.

“Ow,” he said.

She loosened her grip. “We need to keep Stella quiet and calm. She needs to rest for a few days at least. She can’t rest in a bouncing Jeep.”

“All right,” Mitch said.

“We’ll stay here,” Kaye said. “Will it be okay?”

“It’ll have to be,” Mitch said.

Kaye leaned her head against Mitch’s chest. Her eyes lost focus and then closed. “Is she still asleep?” she asked.

“Let’s check,” Mitch said, and they walked together into the living room.

She was. Kaye took Mitch’s hand and led him into the bedroom. They took off their clothes, and Kaye pulled back the covers on the bed until the bottom sheet was completely revealed.

“I need you,” she said.

Her fingers on his lips smelled of tea leaves.

49

OHIO

Dicken had prepared and racked up his seventy specimen sets. He used a Kim Wipe to take the sting of sweat out of his eyes. His sense of urgency was extreme but counterproductive. He could work no faster than produced good results. Anything less would be worse than not having worked at all.

He had labored nine hours straight, first separating and classifying the specimens based on his labels and field notes, then preparing them for the automated lab equipment. Most of the manual labor involved preparing specimens and racking them up for runs through the instruments.

PCR instruments had been the size of large suitcases when he had been a student. Now he could hold one in the palm of his hand. The racks carried what had been the equivalent of a whole building full of equipment fifteen years ago.

Oligos—small but highly specific segments of DNA mounted in each tiny square cell of the whole-genome array chips—attached themselves to complementary segments of RNA expressed by the cell, including viral genes, if any, and labeled them with fluorescent markers. Scanners would count the markers and approximate their positions in the chromosome sequence.

From a prepared set of serological fractions, the sequencers would amplify and analyze the exact genetic code of any viruses in the samples. The proteomizers would list all proteins found within the targeted cells—both viral and host proteins. Proteins could then be matched by the Ideator to the open reading frames of the sequenced genes.

All this would give him a road map of the disease at the cellular level.

He tapped commands into the server controlling the lab machines. Fortunately, the code gaining entry to this computer had been simple to guess. He had tried combinations of JURIE and ARAM and, finally, ARAMJURIE#1, and that had worked.

The lab filled with humming and faint clicking, first to his right, then to his left. Dicken stood up and checked the progress of the little plastic tubes marching in their metal tracks one by one into the prissy little mouths of the white-and-silver machines. He had to admire the way the doctors had set up the lab. It was economical, the equipment neatly arranged, with good flow-through from task to task.

Jurie and Pickman had known their business.

Still, virus hunters who fled at the first signs of a disease were not highly regarded by their peers. Very likely, Jurie and Pickman had never chased down viruses in the field. They had behaved more like lab lizards, pale from lack of tropical sun, utter cowards when confronted by their real prey.

For a moment, Dicken felt a chill. How dumb of him not to think of it earlier. Jurie and Pickman had already done the work, discovered the results; that was why they had run away. The results had been very bad.

But Dicken had found no sign of specimen kits anywhere in the lab. The equipment had barely been used, it was so new.

The chill passed, but slowly.

An hour later, he tapped the space bar on the keyboard to turn off the screen saver. A flashing green bar with “Eureka!” written across it told him he had results. The results were displayed first as thumbnails on a grid, then, at his command, as a slide show.

With grim satisfaction, Dicken saw that he had isolated a recombined variety of unencapsulated RNA virus from the blood and sputum of all the afflicted children, in titers sufficient to suggest massive infection. No other titers were so prominent.

From the beginning, seeing the buccal lesions and stomatitis, Dicken had suspected coxsackie A, known to cause most of the symptoms in the sick SHEVA children. But this strain was seldom associated with fatal illness. Coxsackie B, however, sometimes produced myocarditis, inflammatory heart disease, in infants and children. According to Dr. Kelson, myocarditis was a possible cause of death in the outbreak. Kelson had said, “There’s massive tissue damage. The heart just stops.”

Coxsackie A and B typically spread by fecal contact or exchange of saliva. He did not know of any historical instances where it had spread by skin contact or in aerosols—droplets of moisture from breath or sneezing—or through residues left on surfaces, yet those kinds of transmission were necessary to explain the outbreak’s rapid and pervasive expansion.

Something had changed. Coxsackie A or B, or both, had suddenly become easier to spread, and targeted to a particular population not heretofore known to be vulnerable to most common childhood viruses.

Now that he knew the type of virus, he could focus on the origin of the disease and its etiology—how it had mutated, how it spread, and where it would be expected to spread next.

Dicken typed in a request for numerical results from each set of specimens, with identification of individuals and their circumstances. The computer prepared a table, but it was complicated and unintuitive.

Dicken took out a piece of paper and began organizing the results in his own favored plot. Using a small marker, he drew three large circles on the paper. Within the first circle he swooped a C, representing the children. Inside he drew a smaller circle, labeled IC for Infected Children. Outside the first, he drew a second large circle and labeled it BT for brave teachers and staff, those who had remained.

The third circle he labeled Tr, for traitors, those who had fled.

He picked up a red felt-tip pen and began categorizing the specimen ID numbers and marking them + or – for their viral status. He then recorded them within the appropriate circles. Two of the circles rapidly filled with numbers and status marks. For now, there were no numbers in the Tr circle—he was leaving that open in case information from outside became available.

He now had points of proximity or actual contact and, presumably, opportunities for viral transmission. The pattern he saw emerging was already clear, but he refused to jump to conclusions. He did not trust either intuition or instinct. He trusted hard facts, indisputable associations, and repeated correlations.

He drew the results a second way, in columns and rows. When he had completed his chart, he drew a new table, reversing the order, and filled the boxes with the categorized numbers.

Dicken cleaned up his work and tapped the plastic end of the pen on the columns, marching down, climbing back up, sweeping the marker to the right across the rows, color-coding the associations.

Any way he drew it out, the pattern was clear.

Within the special treatment center, children who had had no contact with teachers or other students for more than three days had not contracted the virus. Eight children had been in isolation cells and had been abandoned when the staff evacuated. Three had died, but all of their specimens tested negative.

Five hours ago, Middleton had phoned the lab to tell Dicken that one of the rescued children had fallen ill, and Kelson said she was likely to die. That child had almost certainly been exposed after her “rescue.”

Dicken had taken specimens from six children who had been locked in a shower room by a fleeing teacher, and not found until late yesterday. One had died from lack of special medication. None had had any contact with teachers or staff for the past forty-eight hours. Their specimens tested negative.

DeWitt and Middleton had identified fifty children whom they knew had had close contact with teachers and staff in the past sixty hours. Of these, forty had fallen ill, and twenty had died. All of their specimens tested positive. Somehow, ten had managed to avoid exposure.

He looked over the results for twenty-two teachers, staff, and security officers. All had had continuous contact with infected children for the past forty-eight hours. They were exhausted, stressed, worn down. Six of these—four nurses from the main pool and one teacher from the special treatment wing, and the counselor, Dewitt—tested positive for the virus, but in low titers compared to infected children. None showed symptoms of infection.

Neither he nor Mark Augustine tested positive.

Dicken held up his chart once more. The conclusions were compelling.

Only infected SHEVA children showed symptoms.

SHEVA children lacking recent adult contact tested negative for the virus and showed no symptoms.

Contagion did not spread from the children to adults with much efficiency, if at all; and if it was passed on, did not cause illness in adults.

Contagion probably did spread from child to child, but the chain always began with children who had had recent contact with adults.

He had not gathered specimens from every child, alive or dead, or from all the adults that had been at the school; it was possible that an asymptomatic child was the source; it was also possible that exposed adults would get ill, eventually.

But he doubted it. The children were almost certainly not the source. And adults did not get sick. The river flowed in only one direction, downstream from teachers and staff, adults, to the new children.

The computer chimed again. Dicken looked at the screen. The Ideator had identified a sequence from its standard human genomic library. He touched a box on the screen. It expanded outward, showing a gene map for an obscure and defective HERV. Coxsackie viruses—for that matter, the superfamily of Picornaviridae—had never been known to recombine with legacy retroviral genes. Yet he was looking at a protein traced to a gene from the suspect virus, and it was very similar—90 percent homologous—to a protein once coded for by an ancient human endogenous retrovirus found in two chromosomes.

The presence of the protein converted a relatively benign RNA virus into one that killed, in large numbers.

He typed in another search. The Ideator scanned the Genesys bank for a match within the 52-chromosome genome of the new children. According to the Genesys bank, that particular defective primordial HERV did not exist in any SHEVA child.

Both of its copies had been discarded during the supermitotic splitting and rearrangement of the old chromosomes.

Dicken stared at the screen for several minutes, thinking furiously. His vision blurred. He grabbed the crumpled wipe and dabbed again at his face. His left leg cramped. He pushed away from the bench and walked around the small lab room, bracing on tables, equipment.

What Augustine and the Emergency Action people feared most had happened. Ancient viruses had somehow self-corrected and contributed one or more novel genes to a common virus, producing a deadly disease. But the recombination had not taken place in SHEVA-affected children.

It had begun in adults.

Adults were creating viruses that could infect and kill the SHEVA children. Those same viruses did not harm the adults. Dicken could yet be sure, but he suspected that the viral protein took advantage of yet another protein expressed only in the children—two units not in themselves toxic, but lethal in combination.

A new role for viruses: agents of a species-level immune response. Biological warfare, one generation against another.

An old species trying desperately to kill the new? Or just an awful mistake, a slip-up with deadly consequences?

He secured the samples, backed up the computer files, made a set of printouts, locked up the lab, and brutally shoved the outer door of the research building. It slammed open, and he walked out into the glare of the afternoon sun.

50

PENNSYLVANIA

Mitch had put on one of George Mackenzie’s white terry robes to check on Stella. He now lay on the bed beside Kaye, the robe ridiculously short over his long legs. His breathing was even. She could feel his hand, large and wide, with long, thick fingers, resting on her arm.

Kaye rolled over and put her head on his chest, where the robe had pulled open. “Have I been acting a little crazy?” she asked.

Mitch shook his head. “Defensive.”

“Do you remember before we were together? You were doing archaeology. I was working away madly, and confused.”

“I wasn’t doing much archaeology,” Mitch said. “I’ve been out of action for longer than I’ve known you. My own damned fault.”

“I loved your rough hands. All the calluses. What would we be without Stella?”

Mitch’s eyes narrowed. Wrong question.

“Right,” Kaye said. She lay back on the pillow. “I insisted. We don’t have any other life now.”

“I helped,” Mitch said.

“I’ve neglected you. In so many ways.”

Mitch shrugged.

“What do you want for Stella?” Kaye asked.

“A reasonably normal life.”

“What will that be? She isn’t like us, not really.”

“She’s more like us than she’s different.”

Kaye wiped her eyes with the back of her hands. She could still feel the caller, and when she touched it with her thoughts, waves of comfort surged through her and her eyes flowed over. She could not understand this feeling of glorious ease in the midst of their fear.

Mitch touched her cheek. His finger gently dabbed the wet corner of one eye.

“What’s it like to have a stroke?” she asked. “Or a seizure?”

“You’re the doctor,” Mitch said, taken aback.

“Sam had a stroke,” Kaye said. Sam was Mitch’s father.

“He went down like a tree,” Mitch said.

“He was paralyzed and he died in a couple of hours.”

“It was fast. What are you getting at?”

“Do people have seizures that make them feel good? They wouldn’t go to the doctor for that, would they?”

“I’ve never heard of such a thing,” Mitch said.

“But it wouldn’t be reported, would it, unless they happened to catch it… on an MRI or CAT scan or something. The brain is so mysterious.”

“What brings this on?” Mitch asked. “We make love and you talk about having good strokes.” He tried to smile. “It’s called having an orgasm, little lady.”

Kaye lifted her head and rolled over to face him, refusing to be amused. “Have you ever felt something or someone touch your thoughts? Approving of everything about you, filling you with understanding?”

“No-o-oo,” Mitch said. He did not like this conversation at all. There was a glow about Kaye’s face that reminded him of when she was pregnant, a soft and intimate light in her eyes.

“Is it rare? What do people do, who do they talk to, when it happens that way?”

“What way?”

Kaye sat up and put her hands on his shoulders, staring at him imploringly, helpless. “Is that what makes people religious?”

The look on Mitch’s face was so serious, she had to smile. “Maybe I’m becoming a priestess. A shaman.”

“Generally,” Mitch began, putting on a professorial tone, “shamans are a little crazy. The tribe feeds them and puts them to work. Shamans are more entertaining than reading entrails or tossing knucklebones.”

Kaye clenched her jaw. “I’m trying to understand something.”

“Out on the dock, did you feel like you were having a stroke?” Mitch asked, unable to keep the concern from his voice.

“I don’t know.” She smiled as if at a pleasant memory. “It’s still with me.”

“You’re pregnant again, morning sickness?”

“No, damn it,” Kaye said, poking his arm. “You’re not listening.”

“I’m not hearing anything I can understand. Tell me, straight… did it feel like an episode, a breakdown? We’ve been under a lot of stress.” He stood up by the side of the bed, leaving the short robe behind. Kaye watched him, his forearms and chest and the tops of his shoulders covered with coarse hair, and her gaze dropped to his genitals hanging at postcoital parade rest, waving with the nervous swing of his arms.

She laughed.

This stopped Mitch cold. He stood like a statue, staring down on her. He had not heard Kaye laugh like that, at him, at the ridiculousness of life, in well over a year, maybe two; he couldn’t remember the last time.

“You sound happy,” he said.

“I’m not happy,” Kaye insisted indignantly. “Life’s a bowl of shit, but our daughter…” Her face crumpled. Through her fingers, she sobbed, “She’s going to live, Mitch. That’s a blessing, isn’t it? Is that what I’m feeling—thankfulness, relief?”

“Thankful to what?” Mitch said. “The god who gives little children nasty diseases?”

Kaye spread out her arms, gesturing with her fingers at the bedroom, the lace coverlet, wood-paneled walls, pressed flowers under glass in ornate gold frames, the decorative water pitcher on the little white wicker table by the nightstand. Mitch watched her puffy eyes and red face with real concern. “We are luckier than others,” she said. “We are so lucky our daughter is alive.”

“God didn’t do that,” Mitch said, his voice turning sour. “We did that. God would have killed her. God is killing thousands like Stella right now.”

“Then what am I feeling?” Kaye asked. She held out her hands and Mitch gripped them. A blackbird sang. Mitch’s eyes went to the window.

“You’re bouncing back,” he said, his anger smoothing. “We can’t feel like shit all the time or we’d just give up and die.” He pulled her up on her knees on the bed, and expertly hugged her until her back popped.

“Ow,” she said.

“That did not hurt,” Mitch said. “You feel better now.”

“I do,” Kaye affirmed, arms around his neck.

Stella pushed through the door. “I’ve got this thing on my wrist,” she said, tugging at the medical tape. “My skin hurts.” She stared at them, naked, together. There was no use keeping secrets from her; she could smell everything in the room. Stella had seemed to instinctively understand the whys and wherefores of sex even as a toddler. Nevertheless, Mitch released Kaye, swung his body away, and reached for the robe.

Kaye pulled the coverlet into a wrap and went to her daughter. Stella leaned into her arms and Kaye and Mitch carried her back to her bed.

51

OHIO

“Our last link to the outside world,” Augustine said, holding up a satellite phone. “Secret Service, bless them. But I had to think of it. They’re hiding out in their cars, and they did not volunteer.” He climbed the flight of steps to Trask’s office. Dried vomit—not his own—ran in streaks down his leg.

Dicken sidled up the steps behind Augustine. “The school has a secure server. I have Jurie’s password for the lab computers, but not the password to go outside the school.”

“I know. What are we looking at, anyway?”

“Coxsackie, a new strain,” Dicken said. “The children have hand, foot, and mouth disease.”

Augustine pushed the door to the office open. “Like the cattle?”

Dicken shook his head. “You’re tired. Listen to me. Not foot and mouth, it’s HFMD. Hand, foot, and mouth. Common childhood viral infection.”

“Recombined?” Augustine sat behind the desk and propped the phone on the desk. He punched a number, got a rasping and wheedling noise, then swore and punched another.

“Yes,” Dicken said.

“With old endogenous viruses?”

“Yes.”

“Shit. How is that possible?”

“It’s a mechanism I haven’t seen before.”

“Then why bother to call?” Augustine stopped in mid-dial, disgusted. His fingernails were black with dirt and secretions. “It’s all over.”

“No, it isn’t. The recombined genes can’t possibly be from the children,” Dicken said. “They don’t have them. They were excised and discarded when their chromosomes reformed during supermitosis.”

Augustine raised his chin. “We helped the virus recombine?”

Dicken nodded. “It may have traveled in us and mutated silently for years. Now it’s making its move—against the children.”

“Proof?”

“Proof enough,” Dicken said. “Most of what we need, anyway. We can send in my results. The CDC just needs to do their own analysis, compare my findings with their own. I’m sure they’ll match. Then, we tell Ohio to back off and get Emergency Action to calm down. This is not a killer plague—not for us.”

“Will anyone listen?” Augustine asked.

“They have to. It’s the truth.”

Augustine did not seem convinced that would be enough to turn the tide. “Who’s the best contact at CDC?”

Dicken thought quickly. “Jane Salter. She’s in charge of statistical analysis at National Center for Infectious Diseases. She never did put in with the Emergency Action people, but they respect her judgment. She’s trusted and objective.” He took the handset from Augustine and dialed Salter’s direct number in Atlanta.

They were in luck, finally. The call went through, and Salter answered in person.

“Jane, it’s Christopher.”

“The famous Christopher Dicken? Long time, Christopher. Forgive me, I’m a little loopy. I’ve been up for days, crunching numbers.”

“I’m in Ohio, at the Goldberger School. I have something important.”

“About a certain recombined Coxsackie virus?”

“That’s the one. Population dynamics, virus flow, analysis,” Dicken said.

“You don’t say.”

“You’ll want my results.”

He heard a click.

“I’m recording, Christopher,” Salter said. “Make it quick. There’s a key meeting in five minutes. Go or no go, if you know what I mean.”

Augustine looked up at a distant roaring noise. He walked to the window and looked across the traffic circle, beyond the main gate. “What the hell is that?” He swung up a pair of binoculars from the windowsill and peered through them. “Helicopters.”

DeWitt stamped up the stairs, screaming, “Helicopters are coming!”

“Troops moving in?” Dicken asked.

“They wouldn’t dare. We’re in quarantine.” Augustine tried to hold the image steady. “They’re civilian. Who in hell would fly them down here?”

“Someone bringing in supplies,” Dicken suggested.

“Is that possible?”

“Someone rich who has a kid here,” Dicken said.

“There’s two of them,” Augustine said. “Not nearly enough.” Then, his voice breaking, “Goddamn. I don’t believe it. They’re shooting. The troops are shooting at them!”

“What’s happening?” Salter asked on the phone.

“Just listen to me,” Dicken said. He could hear the crackle of assault weapons on the school perimeter. “And for God’s sake, work fast.”

He began reading her his results.

52

PENNSYLVANIA

The air was cooling and clouds were sliding in above the trees. Mitch sat on the dock. Kaye was in the house, sleeping beside Stella in the big bed, which Stella preferred now that she was feeling a little better.

It could be days before she could travel, but Mitch knew their time would come sooner than that. Somehow, though, he could not bring himself to roust them and pile them in the back of the Jeep.

It wasn’t just Stella’s health that concerned him.

There was something else, and small as it might seem in retrospect, it disturbed him, the way Kaye had looked, talking about what she had felt on the dock. If after all these years, his partner, his wife, was faltering…

Kaye had always been the reservoir of their strength, the rooted tree.

The air was heavy and moist. He watched the overcast move in and felt the first spatters of rain, big drops that changed the air’s taste and smell. His nose twitched. He could smell the forest getting ready for the storm. His sense of smell had been sensitive even before they had had Stella. He had once told Kaye “I think with my nose.” But that ability had been enhanced by being a SHEVA parent, and for two years after Stella’s birth, Mitch had reveled in what it brought into his life. Even now, he smelled things acutely that others could only vaguely detect, if at all.

The lake was not exactly a healthy lake, but sat like a pretty little pocket of green, taking the drainage from the forest during the winter and spring and then drying up and concentrating all the nutrients during the summer, turning ripe with algae. It had no outlet. Still, it was okay; it was pretty. It was probably happy enough, as lakes went, isolated from the big doings of other lakes and rivers, dreaming in its own muted way of the seasons.

Mitch would never have built a cabin on this lake because of the potential for mosquitoes, but was glad the cabin was here, nonetheless. Besides, there were only a few mosquitoes about, he didn’t know why.

The last few years, Kaye’s scent in his nostrils had been perpetually active, sharp, stressed, and concerned; he had smelled other SHEVA mothers, and mothers in general, and had found a similar watchful odor. In bed a few hours ago, there had been a hint of contentment, of confirmation. Or was he just making that up?

Wishful thinking, that his wife would be happy for a little while?

Stella had noticed it, too.

Perhaps their family had become like the lake, isolated, ingrown, not entirely healthy. And that was why Stella had run away. His thoughts scattered like wavelets under the moving finger of a downdraft.

After a few minutes, Mitch just sat and tried to be empty. Gradually, another concern surfaced, about where they would go when the time came, where they would flee next. He did not know the answer, did not want to believe they were anywhere near the end of their rope, so he put the concern away on a shelf with other impossible worries and looked into the emptiness once more.

The emptiness was comfortable but never lasted long.

He had never asked Kaye how he smelled to her. Kaye did not like to discuss such things. He had fallen in love with a sad and outer-facing Kaye, lived with a woman who had not opened herself to him in months or years, until last night.

Mitch held up his hands and stared at the smooth fingers. He could almost feel himself on a site, with a shovel or trowel or brush or toothbrush in his hand, unearthing some bit of bone or pot. He could almost feel the sweat running down the back of his neck under the hot sun, in the shade of his cap and neck flap.

He wondered what the Neandertal father had thought about, at the last, lying in that Alpine cave, freezing beside his already-dead wife and stillborn child. That was where it had all begun for Mitch, finding the mummies. From that point on, his life had corkscrewed; he had met Kaye, had become part of her world. Mitch’s life had acquired tremendous depth but had narrowed in scope and range.

The Neandertal father had never had a chance to feel guilty about the good old lost days of carefree mammoth and bison hunting, cave-bear baiting, swilling fermented berries or bags of honey wine with the boys.

At least once a day, Mitch went through such a sequence of thoughts, interrupting the desired emptiness. Then the thoughts faded and he stared into himself and saw a frightened child hiding among shadows. You never know what it is like to be a child, even as a child. You have to have one of your own, and then it comes to you.

You understand for the first time.

The rain pattered on the dock, leaving dark brown splats. Drops beaded in the blades of grass shooting up from the moldering life vests. His hand walked along the wood and found an interesting chunk of bark, about six inches long, weathered and gray. He ran his fingers over the bark, pinched its corky edge.

Kaye stood behind him. He had not heard her until the dock creaked. She moved quietly; she always had. “Did you see a flash out here?” she asked.

“Lightning?”

“No, over there.” Kaye pointed into the woods. “Like a glint.”

Mitch stared with a frown. “Nothing.”

Kaye sighed. “Come inside,” she said. “Stella’s having some chicken soup. You should eat, too.”

Watching his daughter slurp soup would be a treat. Mitch stood and walked with Kaye, arm in arm, back to the house.

A man in a black baseball cap stepped out of the cabin’s shadows and met them at the porch door. Kaye gasped. He was young, in his late twenties at most, buff, with tanned arms. He wore a bulletproof vest over a black T-shirt and khaki pants and he carried a small black pistol. Silhouettes moved through the cabin. Mitch instinctively pushed Kaye behind him.

The man in the black cap smelled like burned garlic. He rattled off some words. Mitch’s attention was too divided to listen closely.

“Did you hear me? I’m Agent John Allen, Federal Enforcement for Emergency Action. We have an arrest and sequester warrant. Hold out your arms and let me see your hands.” The agent looked left, past Mitch. “Are you Kaye Lang?”

Another man, older, walked through the double door. He held out a piece of paper in a blue folder. Mitch glanced at the paper, then focused again on the cabin. Over the young man’s shoulder, through the patio doors and past the couch, Mitch saw two men taking Stella out the front door. They had wrapped his daughter in a plastic sheet.

She mewed like a weak kitten.

Mitch raised his hand. Too late, he remembered the piece of bark from the dock, still clenched in his fingers.

The young man jerked up his pistol.

Mitch heard the report and the forest and house spun. The slug felt like a Major League batter connecting with Mitch’s arm. The chunk of bark sailed. He landed on his face and chest. A big man sat on him and others planted their running shoes around his head and someone lifted Kaye’s feet off the ground. Mitch tried to look up and the big man shoved his face into the pebbled concrete of the walkway. He could not breathe—the whack of the slug and then the fall had pushed out all his air. They twisted his hands behind him. Something parted in his shoulder. That hurt like hell. They were all talking at once, and a couple of people were shouting. He heard Kaye scream. The rain hadn’t been so bad. The lake had been fine, and so had the house. He should have known better. Mitch smelled his own blood and started to choke.

53

PENNSYLVANIA-ARIZONA

Stella Nova Rafelson stood on wobbly legs in the long steaming shower stall and watched pink disinfectant swirl down the tile drain. Men and women wearing masks and plastic hoods and rubber gloves walked along the line with clipboards and cameras, recording the children as they stood naked.

“Name,” asked a stout young woman with a husky voice.

“Stella,” she answered. Her joints ached.

In a clinic somewhere, humans gave her injections and strapped her onto a bed surrounded by curtains. They kept her there for at least a day as she worked through the last obvious signs of her illness. Once, when she was released to use a bedpan, she tried to get up and walk away. A nurse and a police officer stopped her. They did not want to touch her. They used long plastic pipes to prod her back into bed.

The next day, she was tied to a gurney and rolled into the back of a white van. The van took her to a big warehouse. There, she saw hundreds of children lying on rows of camp beds. Crushed and dusty crates had been pushed into a pile at the back of the warehouse. The floor blackened her bare feet. The whole building smelled of old wood and dust and disinfectant.

They gave her soup in a squeeze bottle, cold soup. It tasted awful. All that night she cried out for Kaye and for Mitch in a voice so hoarse and weak she could barely hear it herself.

The next trip—in a bus across the desert and through many towns and cities—took a day and a night. She rode with other boys and girls, sitting upright and even sleeping on a bench seat.

She heard the guard and driver talking about the nearest city, Flagstaff, and understood she was in Arizona. As the bus slowed and jolted off the two-lane highway, Stella saw shiny metallic letters cemented into a brick arch over a heavy steel gate: Sable Mountain Emergency Action School.

Time came in confused jerks. Memory and smell mingled and it seemed that her past, her life with Kaye and Mitch, had gone down the drain with the disinfectant.

After they finished taking pictures again and recording their names, the attendants segregated the boys and girls and gave them hospital robes that flapped open at the back and moved the girls in a line across a concrete walkway, under the open evening air, into a mobile trailer unit, twelve new kids in all.

The trailer already held fourteen girls.

One of the girls stood by the bed where Stella lay and said, “Hello/Sorry.”

Stella looked up. The girl was tall and black-haired and had wide, deep brown eyes flecked with green.

“How are you feeling-KUK?” the girl asked her. She seemed to have a speech problem.

“Where am I?”

“It’s kind of like-KUK home,” the girl said.

“Where are my parents?” Stella asked, before she could stop herself. Her cheeks flushed with embarrassment and fear.

“I don’t know,” the girl answered.

The fourteen gathered around the new girls and held out their hands. “Touch palms,” the black-haired girl told them. “It’ll make you feel better.”

Stella tucked her hands into her armpits. “I want to know where my parents are,” she said. “I heard guns.”

The black-haired girl shook her head slowly and touched Stella under the nose with the tip of her finger. Stella jerked her head back.

“You’re with us now,” she said. “Don’t be afraid.”

But Stella was afraid. The room smelled so strange. There were so many and they were all fever-scenting, trying to persuade the new girls. As she felt the scent doing its job, Stella wanted to get away and run.

This was nothing like she had imagined.

“It’s o-KUK-ay,” the black-haired girl said. “Really. It’s okay here.”

Stella cried out for Kaye. She was stubborn. It would be weeks before she stopped crying at night.

She tried to resist joining the other children. They were friendly but she desperately wanted to go back and live in the house in Virginia, the house that she had once tried to run away from; it seemed the best place on Earth.

Finally, as weeks passed into months and no one came for her, she started listening to the girls. She touched their hands and smelled their scenting. She started to belong and did not resist anymore.

The days at the school were long and hot in summer, cold in winter. The sky was huge and impersonal and very different from the tree-framed sky in Virginia. Even the bugs were different.

Stella got used to sitting in classrooms and being visited by doctors.

In a blur of growth and young time, she tried to forget. And even in their sleep, her friends could soothe her.