* * *
—
I sweated and groaned through fever dreams beyond anything in my experience.
Fantastical.
Repetitive.
Terrifying.
* * *
—
When I woke, my fever had broken.
Though my chest still ached, it wasn’t that blinding pain from earlier.
I was alone in my bubble, and Dr. Singh’s voice was coming through the speaker again.
“Hello, Logan. How are you feeling?”
“Better.”
“You scared us. You hit 106.1.”
“I wasn’t trying to set a record or anything.”
“We don’t like seeing fevers go that high. At those levels, organ damage, seizures, even death becomes a possibility.”
“What caused it?” I asked.
“Still running tests, but there are no indications that this is bacterial or caused by an infection. So at this point, we’re thinking whatever’s going on is probably viral.”
Fuck.
Some wack job with a vendetta against the GPA had set a trap. They’d even recorded the moment of exposure.
Scarier than a synthetic virus taking a machete to my body was the other reason people engineered viruses—they’re the perfect machines for carrying foreign genetic information into cells. In other words, they can be used to infect people with a change agent capable of rewriting their DNA.
For me, lying here in quarantine, the idea that this virus might have infected me with something like Scythe, a DNA modifier rewriting the code that makes me me was exponentially more terrifying than the prospect of a simple virus.
“You have someone here who’d like to say hello.”
A new voice came over the speaker.
“Logan?”
I smiled so widely that I felt a corner of my lip split. “Beth?”
“I’m right here in the next room.”
It sounded like she was crying.
I started crying too.
It was the familiarity of her voice—this woman who loved me in spite of everything—and the reminder that I could’ve lost her in the flash of an IED.
“When did you get to Denver?” I asked.
“Yesterday. Ava and I took the loop out here as soon as we heard what happened.”
“Ava’s here?”
“Hey, Dad.”
“Oh my god, hey, kiddo, it’s so good to hear your voice.”
“Yours too.”
“What have they told you?” I asked.
“Not a whole lot. Edwin said that a lab you had gone into exploded. And the doctors told us you might have been exposed to something in the blast and that’s why you’re in quarantine.”
“Sorry about our weekend. We should all be in Shenandoah right now.”
“We’ll go as soon as you’re out of here,” Ava said.
“You’re staying up on school, honey?”
“I am.”
“I don’t want you falling behind again. Me almost getting blown up is no excuse.”
“I think it’s a great excuse. I brought my laptop. I’ve been working in the waiting room.”
“Okay,” Beth said, “they’re telling us we have to let you rest now.”
“You and Ava will be close?”
“We aren’t going anywhere.”
* * *
—
That night, my fever returned.
I tried to sleep, but wild dreams found me. I kept hallucinating that I was inside my body, watching as the virus invaded my cells. Then I became the virus, dissolving myself and my genetic instructions through the cell walls and hijacking its systems to make more of me. More virus particles.
Again and again and—
* * *
—
I smashed into a hot, deranged consciousness.
Nurses in hazmat suits were wrapping my neck in cold packs and pouring ice over my chest.
I was groaning.
Muttering nonsense.
“I am the virus,” I said. “I am the virus.”
Dr. Singh said, “Six hundred milligram push interferon.”
I looked up into my doctor’s face shield. “I can feel it in my cells,” I said.
Dr. Singh ignored me and looked at one of her nurses. “More ice. Quickly.”
It began to rain inside my plastic kingdom, except this wasn’t like any storm I’d ever seen.
The individual raindrops fell as glowing letters—
—adenine, guanine, cytosine, and thymine: the four chemical bases that comprise deoxyribonucleic acid.
DNA.
The air was filled with nucleobases.
They blew sideways.
Formed swirling vortexes.
Ran down the walls of the plastic partition.
Endless, mysterious permutations of the blueprint of all life on Earth.
I could feel the letters splashing down on my face.
I inhaled them.
A torrent of Biocode that kept changing, mutating.
My head was on fire, and I thought if I could only decipher the code, I could understand what the virus was doing to me.
* * *
—
When I came to, there was someone in a hazmat suit sitting next to me. My ribs felt better and the fever was gone, but I was so bone-weary.
The person in the hazmat suit turned to face me.
I looked up into the face of my boss, the director of the Gene Protection Agency, Edwin Rogers. I was glad to see him. I’d applied to work for the GPA straight out of prison. Didn’t think they’d take me seriously, but Edwin Rogers himself had interviewed me and hired me on the spot despite my record of multiple felony convictions and zero law-enforcement experience. For that, he would always have my loyalty.
“Look who’s conscious,” Edwin said.
“Hi,” I said weakly. “How’s Nadine?”
“Still in quarantine, no symptoms. She’ll probably be released in a day or two. I’m afraid you took the brunt of it.”
“And do we know yet what the ‘it’ might be?”
Edwin cleared his throat. “As I’m sure you’ve gathered, you walked into a trap. We’re still holding Henrik Soren. Going to charge him with attempted murder.”
“What’s Soren’s story?” I asked.
“Complete ignorance. He swears he just made a delivery to a man at that house on Thursday morning.”
“No names?” I asked.
“He gave us a generic physical description and a dark-web handle, which is, as you know—”
“Useless.” I strained to sit up, my ribs screaming. Edwin helped to arrange the pillows behind me. “Have you been over to the basement where it happened?”
“I have. We found the remains of two ice bombs. Definitely the strangest IED I’ve ever seen.”
“Was the ice H2O or—”
“H2O, formed into incredibly hard spheres. The explosion turned the ice into fléchettes. That’s what punctured your suit. And you.”
“Were you able to recover any of the melted water or ice fragments?”
“Yes. And we just finished sequencing a sample. Those ice spheres held a virus in supercold suspension.”
I was suddenly wide awake.
“Pretty ingenious actually,” he went on. “The shrapnel gets inside you through superficial cuts and melts without doing lasting physical damage.”
“Oh god.”
He put his gloved hand on my shoulder. “Before you freak out, it’s none of the Filoviridae family viruses you’ve probably been having nightmares about. It’s not Ebola or Marburg. We know it’s not smallpox. It actually has characteristics of the Orthomyxoviridae family.”