Deadline

Seven

Shaun?”

I raised a hand to rub my temple as I raised my head, trying to ward off the headache I could feel brewing there. I’d turned off most of the lights when the rest of the house went to bed, but I hadn’t stopped reading. Maybe that wasn’t such a good idea. “In here, Maggie.” I was sitting on the living room floor, back against the couch. I’d been sitting long enough that I wasn’t sure I could still stand.

Maggie made her way down the darkened hall to the doorway without tripping over anything. I had to admire how well she knew where everything was. I couldn’t have navigated that hall without causing my shins some serious damage. “How’s Mahir?”

“Relieved that we’re not dead. Broadcasting some old camping footage George and I took the last time we went to Santa Cruz. As long as he strips the dates, he should be able to make it look like we were all off having a grand time with the infected when they firebombed our building.”

Maggie swallowed. “And Dave?”

“Stayed behind to take care of the servers. We figure the cleanup on Oakland should be done by morning. They’ll contact his family, and we’ll announce it after they contact us.” It was heartless. It was unforgivable. It was the only choice we had. “I figure we can fake being out in the field for three or four days before we need to find somewhere else to be.”

“Don’t be an idiot.” The edge on her voice was surprising. I blinked. Drawing her tattered terrycloth bathrobe around her shoulders like it was a form of armor, Maggie scowled at me. “You’ll stay right here. My security systems can bounce your signal anywhere we want it to be.”

“Maggie—”

“Don’t you dare tell me it isn’t safe, Shaun Mason. Don’t you dare.” She stalked to the nearest overstuffed armchair and sat, curling her legs under herself and eyeing me like an aggravated cat. “I’ve never been safe in my life. I’m not planning to start now.”

“You can’t tell me that,” I protested. “I’ve seen your security system.”

Maggie’s laugh was rich, bright, and surprising. “I’m going to inherit enough money to buy a small country someday. My parents don’t have anyone else to leave it to. There’s a reason I live in the middle of nowhere and surround myself with reporters. Do you have any idea how good the security on this place really is? If I scream, someone comes. They can’t fake an outbreak on us here that won’t be immediately obvious as a setup. So unless the dead decide to rise en masse again—”

“Which is thankfully not very likely.”

“Exactly. You won’t be safe when you leave here.”

I looked at her measuringly. “Nice cage you’ve got here.”

“Thanks.” She smiled thinly. “The food’s pretty good, but, man, does the company suck.”

“We do our best.” I sighed. “I’m really sorry about all this.”

“Don’t be. Just get some sleep.” Maggie pulled her almost waist-length braid over one shoulder, picking aimlessly at the trailing end. “You’ve had a long day.”

“Yeah, well. Objects in the rearview mirror don’t get smaller just because they’re getting farther away.” I held up one of the folders from Kelly’s briefcase. “I’m trying to make sense out of all this crap while nothing’s catching on fire. I figure that won’t last for long.”

“It never does,” Maggie agreed. “How bad is it?”

“On a scale of one to oh fuck, we’re all gonna die?” I flipped the folder open and read, “ ‘Considering the risk of mutation, the concept of the reservoir conditions as the next stage in Kellis-Amberlee’s evolution cannot be ignored. We would be severely remiss to ignore the opportunities, and dangers, that such an evolution may present.’ ” I closed the folder, but didn’t look up. “What the fuck does it even mean? Somebody’s killing the folks with reservoir conditions. The numbers aren’t lying, even if everybody else is. But what does it mean?”

“It means we have a job to do, I guess.”

“Yes.” I glanced toward the hall. “Everybody else asleep?”

“Yes, they are. I think a few of them may have helped themselves get that way with chemical aid, but whatever works.”

“Good.”

Maggie had prepared the guest rooms while we were still on the road, swallowing her grief long enough to break out fresh bedding and clean towels. I’m pretty sure the process was a sort of good luck charm for her; if she got the rooms ready, we’d show up alive. As it was, when bedtime came, she apologized for having only three guest rooms, since the other two spare rooms had been converted, respectively, into a home theater and a study. Like there’s anything “only” about a house with six bedrooms. George and I grew up in a house with three, and ours were connected enough to practically count as a single room. Three guest rooms meant one each for Alaric, Becks, and the Doc. I’ve slept on couches before. It doesn’t bother me.

Besides, I wanted to stare at those numbers until they started making sense. After almost two hours, I wasn’t getting any closer. I sighed. “I’m missing something. I know I’m missing something.”

Don’t be so hard on yourself, said George. You’re tired.

“That’s easy for you to say,” I snapped, before I could stop myself. Then I froze, casting a careful glance toward Maggie. I was expecting… I don’t know what I was expecting. I get a lot of reactions to the fact that I still talk to my sister. Most of them aren’t good ones.

Maggie’s fell somewhere in the middle of the spectrum. She was looking at me thoughtfully, head tilted slightly to one side. “She really talks to you, doesn’t she?” she asked. “It’s not just you talking to her. She talks back.”

“Hell, half the time she starts it,” I said, half-defensively. “I know it’s weird.”

“Well, yes, it’s weird. Technically, I think it’s insane. But who am I to judge?” Maggie shrugged. “I live in a house most people view as the setting of a horror movie waiting to happen, with an army of security ninjas and a couple dozen epileptic dogs for company. I don’t think I’m qualified to pass judgment on ‘weird.’ ”

That’s a new one, said George, bemused.

“Tell me about it,” I muttered, adding, louder, “That’s, uh, different.”

“At least you know that you’re crazy. That means you have the potential to recover.”

I hesitated. There are a lot of people who’d say that my steadfast refusal to give up on George means I’ll never get over my grief. I sort of hope they’re right. I don’t want to get over it. “Well, um, thanks,” I said. The words sounded even lamer outside my head than they did inside.

Maggie didn’t seem to notice. She was gazing off into one of the darkened corners of the m, expression gone even more wistful. “I knew Dave loved me, you know,” she said, with a studied casualness to her tone. Whatever she was going to say, she was going to say it whether she got the right conversational prompts from me or not. I was an audience, not a participant. “But I was still getting over losing Buffy, and Dave and I, we were doing this… this weird circling thing, like we needed to figure out every single line of the script before we could even start the movie. I knew, and he knew, and we didn’t do a damn thing about it.” She sniffled. A very small sound that seemed loud in the sudden silence of the room. “It’s like we thought everything had to be perfect, or it wouldn’t work. Like it was a story.”

I wanted to say something, but there was nothing to say. I sat frozen, my fingers twitching slightly on the folder I still held. I wanted to reach for her. I wanted to take her hand. Only I knew it wasn’t her hand I wanted—the hand I wanted had been reduced to ash and chips of bone before being scattered down the length of California Highway 1—and so I didn’t move.

“Have you ever been in love?” Maggie looked back toward me, the faint light glittering off the tears running down her cheeks.

There’s never been a good answer to that question. I didn’t even try. I just shrugged.

“Love sucks,” said Maggie, and stood. “Everyone I fall in love with dies. Try to get some sleep tonight, okay, Shaun? And… thanks for listening. I can’t post that.” She chuckled, the sound barely managing to escape turning into a sob. “You know, it seems like every time I wind up with a real tragic love story to tell, I can’t post it. It wouldn’t have been fair to Buffy, and now it wouldn’t be fair to Dave. It’s… there’s so little that’s personal anymore.”

“Yeah,” I said, swallowing past the dryness in my throat. “I’m pretty sure he knew you loved him, too. He had this theater thing set up on the roof—”

“I know.” Her smile was brief, but it was real. “Get some sleep. Tomorrow’s not going to be any better.”

Can’t be any worse, muttered George.

I swallowed the urge to answer George, and said, instead, “I’ll try.”

“Good enough for me,” said Maggie, and turned to go, leaving me alone with my pile of folders, my tiny pool of light, and the voice of my sister echoing inside my head.

You used to make me sleep, said George.

“Yeah, well, you had a body then.” I looked at the folder in my hands, willing it to open of its own accord. That way I wouldn’t actually have to decide whether or not I was going to stop. Once it was open, I could just read.

Shaun—

“Leave it.”

She sighed. I knew that sigh. I knew all her sighs. This was the “Shaun, stop being stupid” sigh, usually reserved for when I needed to be pushed into doing something she considered sensible. I won’t let you dream.

I froze.

George didn’t say anything after that. I could feel her waiting at the edges of my mind, eternally patient, at least where my well-being was concerned. I swallowed again before I leaned back in the chair, closing my eyes. “You can still surprise me,” I said.

Good. Now get up, and get on the couch.

“Yes, ma’am.”

Maggie’s couch proved to be surprisingly comfortable once I’d cleared everything off it and piled it all on the floor. I turned off the light before taking off my shirt and shoes, leaving my jeans on, just in case we needed to make an early-morning getaway. I was asleep almost before my head hit the pillow.

George was true to her word. If I dreamed that night, I don’t remember it.

I woke to the sound of voices in the next room, pitched at that harsh semi-stage-whisper level that everyone seems to think is unobtrusive, despite being impossible to ignore. Something about the sound of people whispering touches off a primordial red alert in the back of the brain. I probably wouldn’t have noticed if they’d just spoken quietly in normal voices. At least no one was screaming; that meant we’d all probably managed to live through the night. Survival is always a nice thing to wake up to.

Sitting up was hard. My back was stiff from spending several hours on the bike, followed by several more hours sitting on the floor and trying to study. I may not spend as much time in the field as I used to, but that hasn’t made me a bookworm or anything. Who knew being a geek would hurt? Groaning, I braced my elbows on my knees and dropped my head into my hands. The voices from the kitchen stopped. Zombies don’t groan, they moan, but the two can sound almost identical to the untrained ear. Of the four people in the house with me, only Becks had the field experience necessary to know that whatever had made that sound was alive. Just cranky.

Becks and Alaric both had enough general experience working with me to know better than to come poking before I was at least standing under my own power. The voices from the kitchen resumed, a little louder now that they knew they didn’t have to worry about waking me anymore. Leaving my head cradled in my hands, I considered my options. Going back to sleep was at the top of the list and had the extra added bonus of not requiring me to think about anything. Unfortunately, whoever was killing the people with reservoir conditions wasn’t going to wait around for me to get my shit together, and if anyone realized Kelly was still alive, we probably didn’t have all that much time.

There was always the possibility that time had already run out. If Kelly’s original fake ID was compromised, they might have tracked her across the country with it. That didn’t explain why they waited for her to reach us before going on the offensive, but maybe she just hadn’t held still long enough before that. They wouldn’t be tracking her that way again. Her fake ID was so much slag in the remains of Oakland, and nobody outside the team knew she was alive.

Now we just had to keep it that way.

The outbreak could have been triggered in response to my call to Dr. Wynne, but that didn’t sm likely. The timelines didn’t synch. That level of outbreak would take time to set up. Even if it had started the second my call was connected to the CDC, there wasn’t time for all those people to amplify and get into position. Whoever targeted us—assuming it was a “who,” which had to be my operating assumption, at least until something came along to make a strong case for coincidence—had more time than my phone call gave them.

I lifted my head, groaning again, and stood. One of the bulldogs had turned my discarded shirt into a makeshift doggy bed, probably as revenge for my taking up the entire couch. It opened one eye to watch me as I approached, and made a small “buff” noise that might have been intimidating, if it hadn’t been roughly the size of an overweight housecat. “Whatever, dude,” I said, putting up my hands. “I wasn’t that cold anyway.”

Alaric, Becks, and Kelly were gathered around the kitchen table when I came shuffling in, making a half-hearted attempt to push my spiked-up hair back into a semblance of order. All three looked over at my entrance. Becks raised her eyebrows.

“You’re looking bright and shirtless this morning,” she said, dryly. “Did you decide that clothes were for sissies?”

“Dog took my shirt,” I replied. “Where’s Maggie? Is there coffee? If Maggie’s hiding because she drank all the coffee, it’s not going to be pretty.”

“Ms. Garcia is, um, out back, in the garden,” said Kelly. She gestured toward the back door as she spoke, looking distinctly uncomfortable. Understandable. She’d probably never been in a private residence open to the scary, scary outside world before. Sometimes I think George was right when she said that people want to be afraid.

“Coffee’s on the stove,” said Alaric, before adding quickly, “Do we have a plan, or are we just going to sit around here drinking coffee and waiting to see what happens next?”

“That depends on the Doc.” I walked over to the stove. A half-full pot of coffee was on the central heating plate. “We know what happened yesterday wasn’t just bad timing. So I guess the question is, Doc, were they after us, or were they after you?”

Silence fell behind me. I took a mug from the rack and poured myself a cup of coffee, taking a slow, patient sip as I waited for someone to say something. The liquid was almost hot enough to be scalding, and it tasted like it had been brewed just this side of Heaven. I’ll drink Coke for George all day if I have to, but there’s nothing like that first cup of coffee to get the morning started.

Finally, in a small voice, Kelly said, “Dr. Wynne thought we were managing to get me out before our plan could be compromised. With most of my team dead, it’s not like there were that many people who knew about the clone, or what we were going to do with it. It should have been a clean escape. He did say… When I left, he said you were probably in danger anyway, because of…” She stopped. A lot of people have trouble talking about what happened to George when I’m in the room. I can’t decide whether it’s because they don’t want to remind me that I was the one to pull the trigger, or if it’s because they can’t deal with the fact that she’s still with me. Maybe they just don’t feel like getting punched in the face.

The why doesn’t matter much to me. The end result is the same: George stays dead, and no one talks about it.

“You knew we were in danger before you reached us?” I recognized the warning in the tone Becks was using. She started as a Newsie, and she processes facts a little faster than most Irwins. That gives her the ability to sound very reasonable, and the more reasonable she sounds, the more danger you’re in. “And you didn’t say anything?”

“There will be no killing the Doc,” I said, walking over to the settle at the table. “She’s just as screwed as we are, so play nicely, okay? This isn’t her fault.”

Kelly nodded firmly, looking more frustrated than anything else. “I tried to say something. I was e-mailing you for three weeks before we hit the point where I couldn’t hang around in Memphis anymore.”

The spam filters, said George quietly.

I winced.

“A secure phone line would have been noticed in a facility as locked down as the CDC,” Kelly continued. “When Dr. Wynne evacuated me, I wound up drugged and stuffed into the back of a truck that was hauling dry goods to California. I barely had a pulse for a few thousand miles. I definitely wasn’t in any condition to make phone calls.”

“You could still have opened the conversation with the fact that we might want to evacuate,” said Becks.

“Would you have listened?” asked Kelly.

Becks looked away.

Kelly sighed. “I thought not. Look: I had no way of knowing things would get that bad, that fast. The world doesn’t work like that in the lab. Things go slower there.” She took a shaky breath, calming herself. “Our research team was down to three when we realized none of us were safe. We had to get someone out alive if we wanted to preserve our results. Dr. O’Shea wasn’t willing to take the risk, and Dr. Li had a family. It had to be me. So I went to Dr. Wynne.”

“And he had you cloned,” I deadpanned. “Naturally. Why didn’t I think of that?”

“I had to seem to die—it was the only way that I’d have a chance at getting away with our results. Dr. O’Shea was working on a nerve study that required full-body subjects. She set up the clone. It was supposed to be her DNA.”

“Swap-off happened at the techie level?” asked Alaric, suddenly paying attention. He always paid attention when something started smelling like a story.

“Yes,” said Kelly. “One intern handed the sample to another intern, who handed it to a lab tech when Dr. Wynne asked him to run an errand instead, and by that point, it was easy enough to get the sample from the incubator and swap in one of my own samples instead.”

Ask her why the source DNA matters, prompted George.

“Right,” I muttered, before saying, in a more conversationalone, “Why does the source DNA matter? I thought the CDC was exempt from the prohibition against cloning.”

“Clones are illegal for moral reasons. The CDC’s dispensation allows researchers to do full-body cloning for research purposes, and the moral questions are skirted by permitting only self-cloning,” said Kelly. “That way the question of the clone having a soul can be politely ignored, and the religious community doesn’t feel the need to shut us down.”

“Because presumably there’s just one soul per genetic pattern, and the original donor holds the copyright?” I asked. Kelly nodded. I snorted. “That’s a fun piece of bureaucratic jump rope if I’ve ever seen one. So fine, they think they cloned this other lady, and they actually cloned you. What’s going to keep somebody from doing the math when they crack the factory seal on her and there’s nothing there?”

“Dr. O’Shea died two weeks ago. There was an error in her car’s electrical system and she lost control on the freeway.” Kelly looked at me, lips drawing back in a smile that looked more like a rictus. “It was very sad. Our superiors were quick to offer their regrets and let us know that if we wanted to shut down the program, they’d support our moving on to other research projects. An immediate destruction notice was issued on her clone, since the original was deceased. It was officially destroyed four days before my ‘death.’ ” She hesitated before adding, much more softly, “Dr. Li was killed in a lab accident the day after that.”

“How come no one noticed they were short a clone?” asked Becks.

Kelly shrugged, shaking off her brief malaise. “Clones are considered lab waste. Anyone can dispose of them.”

“So you disposed of the clone that didn’t exist.”

“Exactly.”

“What did I miss?” asked Maggie, coming in with a basket full of tomatoes over one arm. “Hey, Shaun, you’re up. Can I get you anything? Toast? Omelet?”

“An omelet would be great, and you got here just in time to hear the Doc explain how they broke her clone out of storage and slaughtered it like a chicken so she’d be free to come and make herself our problem.” I took another drink of coffee and stopped, grimacing. “Also, you got any Coke?”

Alaric and Becks exchanged a look. Maggie simply nodded, saying, “I’ll get you one in a minute,” as she continued across the kitchen to begin fussing with her harvest. “Keep talking, everybody. I’m sure I’ll catch right up.”

“Great.” I looked back to Kelly. “Carry on, Doc. We’re burning daylight here, and you’ve just made that a rare commodity around these parts.”

“My clone wasn’t slaughtered like a chicken,” she protested. “Dr. Wynne knows some people. Professional people. He hired them to break in and shoot the clone after we’d decanted it. They guaranteed a kill on the first shot. It didn’t have time to suffer.”

“And then you ran for us.”

“And then I ran for youKelly glanced away. Her gaze fell on the open door and she grimaced, looking down at her lap instead. “Your… There were a lot of records detailing the progression of Georgia Mason’s retinal Kellis-Amberlee. The particular nature of your mutual upbringing provided an invaluable source of data.”

“Meaning what, exactly?” asked Maggie, putting a skillet on the stove.

“She means there were cameras on us all the time when we were kids, and we got a lot of med tests so we could follow the ’rents into proscribed areas.” I watched Kelly. Kelly kept watching her lap. “It made George a great case study, without any of those pesky release forms getting in the way.”

“Mm-hmm,” said Kelly, looking up. “That also makes you a great case study.”

“Me?”

You, confirmed George, quietly. Prolonged exposure to someone with a reservoir condition is odd enough, but for you to be my—

“—makes your immunological reactions uniquely fascinating,” said Kelly, her words overlaying Georgia’s until she drowned out the voice in my head. I managed not to jump. My hand still shook hard enough to slosh the remainder of my coffee dangerously close to the edge. I put the cup down on the table. Kelly didn’t seem to notice. “We would have been asking you to come in for some tests later this year if our study had been allowed to develop normally. Just to see if there were any deep abnormalities that might explain why she developed retinal Kellis-Amberlee and you didn’t. Of course, with Georgia dead, there’s always the possibility whoever’s killing the people with reservoir conditions could come after you, instead. We don’t know what the motive is there.”

“So combine Shaun’s possibly fucked-up immune system with all the footage we’ve got, and our known connections to the research team, and we’re a target, is that it?” asked Becks. “Note for the future? This is the sort of shit you should maybe lead off with. ‘Hi, nice to see you, just faked my own death, and PS, the people who want me dead are probably after you, too.’ ”

“Yes,” said Maggie pleasantly, as she started cracking eggs into the pan. “It might’ve saved Dave’s life.”

“That’s not fair,” interjected Kelly.

Maggie ignored her. “Two eggs or three, Shaun?”

“Three, please. I doubt we’re going to be stopping for a big lunch.”

“Good. Will you need to bury her body in the forest behind my house tonight, or will you be keeping her around a little longer for informational purposes?” This question was asked just as pleasantly as the last. Maggie’s tone didn’t hold anything to indicate that killing Kelly was of any more or less importance than my omelet.

Maggie can be like that sometimes. She’s grown beyond her upbringing, for the most part, but sometimes she’s still a spoiled little rich girl whose response to things she doesn’t like begins and ends with getting rid of them.

It’s better not to argue with her when she gets that way. “Informational purposes, but I promise to let you know when that changes,” I said. Kelly paled. I decided that the polite thing would be to ignore it. “Any news out of Oakland?”

“The announcement of Dave’s death went up about an hour ago,” said Alaric, quietly.

“Okay.” I looked at my coffee, and sighed. “What do our site stats look like?”

“Up five percent globally, Dave’s reports are up thirty-five percent, and we have three syndication requests for his Alaska material from last year.” Alaric sounded a lot more confident in this answer. That wasn’t surprising. Next to Mahir, there’s nobody who tracks our standings as carefully as Alaric does.

“Did Maggie fill you in on the cover story?” Everyone nodded. “Good. Has anyone posted?” Everyone shook their heads. “Not so good. I need you all online. We were camping in Santa Cruz, our apartment got blown up, we’re shaken, we’re going to stay in the field for a few days while we recover. Maggie, I want you to make it clear that you’re here alone. Tack on a poem I don’t understand, with lots of creepy-ass death imagery—the usual—and then if you can double security, that would probably be a bonus. Nobody say anything about the Doc. She’s not here.”

“I’ll get right on that,” Maggie said, walking over and slapping a can of Coke into my hand before putting the plate with my omelet next to my discarded coffee cup.

“Good. Becks—”

“Come up with some believable outdoor footage.” She stood, picking up her plate. “I’ll set up out in the van.”

“Good. Alaric—”

“Ground-level analysis of the Oakland tragedy, short memorial piece on Dave.” He rose as he spoke, expression already far away. “I should be able to cobble something together fast enough to let me hit the forums and do some damage control after.”

“That’s excellent. Now what are we going to do about the Doc?”

“I thought you’d ask that,” said Alaric, looking briefly smug. He likes being efficient. “I checked Buffy’s stock of precoded IDs. Kelly looks enough like Buffy did that she can use most of them.”

“Any of them come with medical credentials?”

“No strict medical, but three scientific. I have an ichthyologist—a fish scientist,” Alaric added, seeing my look of blank incomprehension. “Also a theoretical physicist and a psychologist.”

“I minored in psychology,” said Kelly, sounding relieved to have something to contribute to the discussion. “I’ve never practiced, but I can fake it if I have to.”

“Great. Alaric, get the ID up and running, make sure it passes any surface checks people are likely to run, and go from there. You’re still a doc, Doc. We’re going to hire you to replace Dave as soon as we come back to civilization.” Kelly looked faintly alarmed. I grinned. “Don’t worry. Mahir will ghostwrite your articles, and we’ll just publish them under—what byline are we publishing these under, Alaric?”

“Barbara Tinney.”

“Great. We’ll publish them under the Barbara Tinney byline. It reinforces the impression that you’re legit—and we can just call you ‘Doc’ in public.”

“You’re crazy,” pronounced Becks.

“And you’re carrying eight guns,” I replied. “Now that we’ve covered what everybody knows, can we move on? When I post, I’ll say a few words about Dave and how honored we all are to have worked with him, bullshit, bullshit, blah, blah, blah.” I waved my free hand vaguely before cracking open the Coke and taking a deep drink. The acidic sweetness hit the back of my throat like a slap. I choked a little, getting my breath back, and finished: “I’ll hit the staff boards. Give everybody the edited version of the situation. Be done with your reports and ready to roll by ten.”

“Where are we going?” asked Kelly, looking like she couldn’t tell whether she should be relieved to be getting away from Maggie or worried about what was coming next.

“And why are we going now?” asked Alaric.

I couldn’t blame him for the question. He wasn’t there when we lost Buffy, or when we lost George. I took a deep breath, held it long enough to be sure I’d stay calm while I answered him, and said, “If we sit here until we feel ready to move, we’re never going to move again. We’re going to get comfortable, and we’re going to stay here until we die. We don’t want to run off half-cocked, either, but there’s a line between the two, and if we don’t find it, we’re fucked. As for where we’re going…” I turned a predatory smile on Kelly. “That’s what the Doc here is going to tell me.”

“Me?” she asked, sounding surprised.

“You. Come on. We’re using the living room terminal, and you’re going to explain what I’m not getting out of all those lovely notes you brought for us.” Picking up my omelet, I added, “You have your assignments, everybody. Two hours. Be ready.”

Kelly followed me to the living room and sat next to me at the desk. “Perk up. It’s not like you went out of the frying pan and into the fire. It’s more like out of the frying pan and into the industrial-strength toaster.”

“I don’t understand.” She shook her head, looking perplexed. “This is our chance to go to ground. Why aren’t we doing it?”

“And where would we go? Canada? We’re not going to get any answers there. I trust Maggie’s system to keep us off the grid, and whoever arranged to have Oakland deleted is going to have trouble sweeping it under the rug if they pull it a second time. I know my job, okay?” I tapped the side of my head, smile fading. “I’ve got a few brain cells still working up here.”

“I didn’t mean—”

“Don’t start. My mood stays better if you don’t start.” I turned to the keyboard. The terminal turned itself on as soon as its sensors “saw” me looking at it, and I typed my password to unlock the home network.

“Noted,” she said. She didn’t sound like she approved, but at the moment, that was at the bottom of my priority list.

“Good.” All Maggie’s computer equipment was top of the line. Having parents with money and Buffy Meissonier as your original technical consultant will do that. “I spent a few hours after the rest of you went to bed going through those files you brought us last night. Didn’t understand half of what I was reading, but George managed to explain some of it for me.”

Kelly’s expression went very still, like she was fighting an inner battle to keep herself from pointing out that George couldn’t explain anything, because, guess what, George was dead. I’ve seen that look a lot since the funeral. As long as she could keep herself from saying anything, I could keep myself from getting angry that she’d want to.

“Really,” she said finally, in a neutral tone that could have meant just about anything.

Good enough for me. “Really,” I confirmed. “What I’m curious about is the list of labs. How many of those are going to be safe for us to visit? Where can we go to get the fieldwork side of the equation?” Kelly’s files gave us numbers, but they didn’t give us the rest of the picture. If we were going to understand, we needed to talk to someone who could confirm or contest the data—and if the CDC had been steered away from researching the reservoir conditions for as long as Kelly said, the labs on our list might have pieces of the puzzle we didn’t even know existed yet.

“All the labs on list A are ones with head researchers a member of the team worked with directly at some point, either before or after they went into the private sector,” she said, sounding much more relaxed now that she was dealing with verified facts instead of crazy reporters. “List B contains the labs where someone had personal experience with the supporting researchers, but not the head of the lab, and list C is made up of the labs where we had only secondhand information on the people working there. Reputations, credentials, whether or not they bothered to check their sources…”

“What about list D?” My hands were moving as we spoke, spewing out line after line of borderline coherent claptrap. It was the day after a death. We’d be expected to update—nothing was going to get us out of that, not even actually dying; George’s blog may have changed names when she died, but her backlog of files meant she missed less than a week. That didn’t mean we were expected to be profound.

“Ah.” Kelly’s tone was disapproving enough that I actually glanced toward her. Her lips were pursed into a tight moue of distaste. “That would be the labs where the researchers have been confirmed as following less than ethical paths in their research.”

“What, vivisection? Human test subjects?” I pressed Post on my first entry of the day, switched from my own feed to the administrative, and started typing again as I asked, “Full-body cloning?”

“It’s different when the CDC does it,” she said sharply. “We have a dispensation.”

“So?” I shrugged, continuing to type. “That doesn’t make it right. Hsaid, soany of the labs on list D would have been on list A if you weren’t being judgmental?”

Kelly sighed. “Two, at most.”

“Okay. Either of them anywhere near here?”

There was a horrified pause as she realized what I was asking. “Shaun, you don’t understand! These people were blacklisted from reputable scientific circles for a lot of reasons, and not all of them were as petty as you seem to think! These are not the secret heroes of some underground resistance against the evil CDC—they’re bioterrorists and crazy people, and they’re dangerous. We could get seriously hurt if we go to them. We could get killed.”

“And we could get killed if we stay here. I’m not seeing a difference in results.” I picked up George’s Coke and took another swig. “Your objections are noted. Can any of these people be trusted? At all? Or do I just pick one at random and hope they aren’t on the Frankenstein end of the ‘mad doctor’ scale?”

Kelly swallowed, throat working as she struggled against some clear inner impulse not to answer. Finally she said, “Dr. Abbey. I read some of the work she did on reservoir conditions before she went off the grid. I think she’d be able to help us.”

“Fine. Where is she?”

She sighed. “Portland, Oregon.”

“That’s a five- or six-hour drive if we take the direct route,” I said, sipping again from the can. “Annoying, but manageable. What was the big crime that got them blacklisted?”

“Unethical experiments involving the manipulation of the viral structure of Kellis-Amberlee. None involving human subjects, thank God, or she and her staff would be in federal prison for the rest of their lives.”

“I’m surprised they aren’t in federal prison anyway. How much blackmail material did she have?”

“Enough.” Kelly shook her head. “I don’t know much—it was all before my time—but she worked for Health Canada. Joint research team, theirs and ours. Some bad things happened, and she quit. Ever since then, she’s been pretty careful about who she lets get anywhere near her or her research.”

“Better watch out, Doc. That sounded almost like respect.”

“I like people who are serious about their work.” She shrugged. “Dr. Abbey was devoted to figuring out Kellis-Amberlee.”

“Somebody has to be.” I swung back around to the keyboard. “Better go see if Maggie’s got something you can wear, Doc. We’re going on another road trip.”