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:

MACKENZIE
George and Iris and Kelly

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.