This is the room where Bailey died.
SIXTEEN
Ana steps around the couch and moves toward the rows of cubicles. She follows a narrow walkway through the dividers toward the back of the room.
Bailey walked here, just like this, but how long ago?
Ana passes the sign-up sheet for a lunch that will never be ordered, passes a framed award that no one cares about any longer, passes a fold in the carpet that Bailey tripped over in another world, in another life.
Bailey’s desk is pin-neat, with two ballpoint pens placed at right angles to a spiral notebook; a cherry-red cup of congealed coffee sits in the center of a mosaic-tiled coaster; a wide, slim monitor shows a screen full of multicolored fish. On the rim of the monitor is a yellow sticky note with the scrawl: Call Brian!
Ana catches her breath and moves inside the cube. The phone is on the right side of the desk, half-hidden by the back of Bailey’s swivel chair.
On the desk, next to the phone, there is a hand.
Ana moves the chair, and a body—Bailey’s body, still wearing its white lab coat—tumbles to the floor. Bailey’s eyes are wide and fixed. Her long blond curls are stuck to the side of her face and caked with blood.
Ana’s heart is pounding like thunder in her ears as she reaches down to touch Bailey’s hand. It’s stone cold.
She sees now that there are smears of blood everywhere—on the desk, on the chair, on the carpet. Something inside her curls into a tight ball. Not until now was Bailey truly real to her; it’s as if Bailey has both come to life and died in the same moment.
Choking back a sob, Ana folds Bailey’s arms across her chest, wishing there were something she could do, knowing it’s far too late. And also wishing—selfishly, I know this—that Bailey could have been alive to tell her what’s going. To help provide some answers.
She stands up, and her hip jostles Bailey’s desk. The fish swimming across the monitor fade out, replaced by a brightly colored desktop littered with icons. There’s a console pocket just below the rim of the desk.
Maybe there’s nothing she can do for Bailey. But the answers—who am I? where am I? what’s going on?—might not yet be out of Ana’s reach.
Sliding Bailey’s chair to the side—she can’t bring herself to sit down in it—Ana kneels in front of the desk and slides both hands into the console pocket. Within the silky inner pocket, magnetic imaging gloves tighten into place around her fingers.
There’s a moment of uncertainty while her blank memory wonders what to do, but then her fingers start moving. She knows this. She might not remember it, but her body knows.
With barely perceptible movements, Ana reaches into the computer, watching her actions play out on the screen as she sorts through folders. A window pops up with a file list and she scrolls through it. There’s so much here, and she has no idea where to start.
She doesn’t even know what she’s looking for.
She browses, opens, closes, clicks, groans in frustration. There’s too much! And none of it feels at all relevant.
Giving up on the file list, she pulls up a display of recently activated programs. Something catches her eye: an icon with the image of a tiny planet. The label says PARASIM. Ana selects the program, and it pops up from a minimized window. The program was already running.
The screen erupts with information: lists and coordinates and arrows and features and taglines and buttons. It’s obviously a world of work and care and monitoring. But monitoring what?
At the top of the window, a pale pink speech bubble is gently flashing. Ana clicks on it, and it opens up a chat window:
Ana positions the cursor to hover over the T/O, which must signify the originator of the message, and sees TODD OSLOW.
What?
She’s looking at the last in a long series of messages. Ana scrolls back up to the top of the window and sees more pale pink bubbles from TODD OSLOW, yellow ones from YSA KLEIN, and blue ones from CHEN WAI.
Ana feels suddenly dizzy. The messages from Todd begin with random updates:
They start to communicate alarm:
And then there’s one that makes Ana’s heartbeat go into rapid fire:
AO as in Ana Ortez? She thinks about when Todd left her alone in the cave. And he must have found other moments as they traveled together to send in reports. She frowns, thinking of at least one time when he was fiddling with his circlet while they were on the run.
Near the end of the string of messages she sees a series of frantic reports from Ysa:
Ana suddenly realizes something has been nagging at her about the messages: as she clicks on and reads each one, its color changes, going from a creamy pale to a darker, more vivid color.
Nearly half of the messages were unread.
Could it be that Bailey never saw the cries for help? The whole time they were running and fighting for their lives, the whole time Chen and Ysa were dying on some distant planet—and no one knew?
Yet she, Ana, made it back safely from this trip. How did that happen? Who sent her home?
Ana drops her forehead to the desk, forcing herself to breathe slowly in and out. The smell of blood and death fills her nostrils, and her head spins. She needs to focus, and the most important thing she needs to figure out is what’s happening here now. The planet stuff, her travel, that can wait until later.
For now—why are people bleeding to death?
She thinks back to what she saw of Bailey’s experiences, inside those memory strands. There was talk of a sickness on Earth, some kind of disease that was spreading so fast no one was prepared for it. And now apparently the disease has spread and Bailey really is dead. She thinks of Bailey’s memory of Pat, thinks of the newscaster she saw, dead on live television.
Bailey and how many others?
Lifting her head again, Ana shuts down the ParaSim program, leaving the rest of the messages unread. She scans the rest of the icons on the desktop, wondering if there’s anything she’s missed, knowing there’s still vital information she doesn’t have.
What sickness is this?
And then she sees it: right in the center of the screen, the icon of a notebook page, topped by a small red flag. Whatever that is, the flag marks it as urgent. She remembers Bailey talking about a report she’d been working on, something she desperately needed to update. Could this be it?
Shifting her hands inside the console, Ana selects the icon and opens up the word processor. The page is topped with large red letters: URGENT AND CONFIDENTIAL.
Hands shaking, Ana scrolls down and begins to read.
TO: Jackson R. Pritchett
FROM: Bailey Sinclair
SUBJ: Analysis of Vermiletum-V: Overview of Disorder and Newly Increased Infection Risk
Originally thought to be a containable disease, Vermiletum’s recent mutation shows an alarmingly high threat potential. The prion-based infection widely referred to by the public as a virus is in fact a malignant neurological disorder caused when normal proteins in the brain begin to misfold into mutated form.
Once triggered, these defective proteins, or prions, begin to affect the hippocampus, playing upon the storage and retrieval of long-term memories. Subsequently spreading to the amygdala, the infection appears to magnify memories associated with a strong fear response, simultaneously amplifying the brain’s electrical activity to hundreds of times its usual strength.
This amplifi
ed electrical activity appears responsible for Vermiletum’s highly unusual form of transmission. The amplification is so strong that the electrical pulse can reach out to infect nearby individuals, triggering the misfolding in new victims. Neural pathways are thus altered to the extent that these warped biochemical signals can be continually broadcast out to infect new victims with absolutely no need for physical contact.
As the infection progresses, it activates fear centers in the brain, triggering a release of stress hormones and causing severe panic attacks. The disease inhibits the reuptake of these hormones, preventing them from being absorbed into the body and causing the attacks to continuously increase in length and scope. Other organ systems are subsequently affected, notably the circulatory system, which leads to hemorrhaging in the liver, lungs, and kidneys, resulting in eventual organ failure and finally death.
Because neural pathways in the infected are permanently altered, there has been much speculation in scientific journals that if the infection were successfully reversed in just one patient, that patient’s brain would continue to transmit a signal to those nearby, but the signal would shift from one that is warped and infection-creating to one that is balanced and infection-cleansing. The hope is that this would lead to a cascade effect, something like a reverse infection pattern. Unfortunately to date there has been no progress made in understanding how to reverse the infection.
In any event, any hopes for such efforts appear to come too late, as the disease has now morphed into a far more virulent strain, Vermiletum-V. Documented cases of the new variant include a notably decreased incubation period, with first symptoms appearing within hours (rather than weeks) of infection, and strikingly amplified fear responses. The scope of contagion also seems highly accelerated, imprinting the infection in new victims through the most casual of cognitive contact.
Further study and immediate decisive action is necessary if we are to avoid a pandemic of unimaginable proportions.
Ana’s pulse is pounding in her ears as she slowly draws her hands out of the console pocket. Vermiletum. Just one word, and the cause of so much death and destruction. So that’s what happened to Bailey and … how many more?
She suddenly, desperately, needs to find someone else, anyone else who is still alive.
Ana jumps up and sprints through the cubicles toward the main door leading out of the office. She pushes through and looks up and down a bright white hallway. Which way? There’s a blinking light farther down the hall, and she follows it to an elevator, and a sign that says FLOOR 16.
Ana presses the call button, and after a moment the doors slide open. Stepping inside is like passing for one brief moment into another world, someplace normal, where everything is all right again.
The moment passes.
She pushes G for ground.
The walls of the elevator are mirrored. As the elevator descends, Ana stares at herself, at this wide-eyed, disheveled stranger until she finally can’t stand it anymore and turns away. Stop. She didn’t let herself cry for Bailey; she won’t cry for herself.
The doors slide open again, and Ana steps into a brightly lit foyer. It’s empty.
Ana’s heart starts up a slow, pounding rhythm. She walks across a plush red carpet to a tiled marble floor. Through a revolving glass door she can see the dark outside. Directly opposite the door is a massive mahogany desk, but no one is sitting at it. On one side of the desk is a smaller door marked EMERGENCY EXIT; on the door’s white paint is a bright red handprint.
Bailey’s blood-streaked face flashes through Ana’s mind. Ana turns away from the print, pushes through the revolving door, and steps out into the night.
A cold wind slams into her. She looks up and down the narrow street. It’s deserted, and though a row of cars are parked along one side, there’s nobody walking or driving nearby. Farther down the street Ana sees the glowing sign of a late-night café. Wrapping her arms tightly around herself, she starts down the sidewalk toward it. A flicker of movement in her peripheral vision catches her eye, and her heart leaps—but it’s just a sheet of newspaper blowing down the sidewalk.
Wait, newspaper? Ana chases the paper down, grabs it out of the air, and scans the headlines:
Vermiletum Death Toll Out of Control—
Is This THE END?
Cover-up Suspected: How Long Has the Government Known?
Vaccine Rumors Prove Unfounded
It’s all about the disease, every article on the whole page, box after box, tiny print crammed across every inch of space, like maybe the editor knew this was the last paper that would ever be printed and wanted to fill it with everything that needed to be said.
One article in particular catches her eye:
Ana lets go of the paper and watches it blow away down the street. Everything is eerily still. Lights are on in the buildings overlooking the street, but there are no movements inside. And there are no people, no cars—not even the scurrying of any animal noises. Just the night and the wind, and the lone newspaper death-dancing down the road.
The paper catches on the bumper of a car, and Ana sees a half-empty shopping bag in the gutter next to it. Groceries are spilled across the curb. Lying next to them, half in the street, is a body. A body in a pool of blood.
She sees another body lying farther down the street, head bent at an odd angle. She turns to look behind her and sees a car—how could she have missed it?—half-smashed through the window of a bank on the corner. Two or three still forms farther down the dark sidewalk look like what Ana now knows they must be: more bodies.
The dead are everywhere in this new old world.
A sob rises in her throat. Is the whole world dead?
The street is suddenly ringing with a silence that claws her ears. The thought of never hearing another voice, never seeing another person consumes her.
She yells. “Is anybody here? Is there anyone that’s still alive?”
The words echo up and down the empty street. There are no survivors here. There’s just the corpse of a world she cannot remember, a past she can’t even properly mourn.
Though she probably won’t be mourning it for long. Now that she’s back, she’s sure to catch this disease, too. Something that virulent? It’s just a matter of time.
Then something buzzes in her back pocket.
Ana reaches down and pulls out a slim see-through device—a phone!—the size of her palm. She looks at the screen.
1 new text message
Her fingers tremble as she navigates the touch screen. The window opens up, and Ana falls into the words.
RU alive? Where?
A mad churning starts in Ana’s stomach as she looks at the sender.
Ysa Klein.
She thinks of the last time she saw Ysa on far-off Paradox, of how she was pulled out of Ana’s grasp, of the fear and resignation clouding her bright eyes. Ysa is gone, Ana would swear to that.
So how is a dead girl sending her a message?
SEVENTEEN
All the way back up the elevator there’s no follow-up text, no response to Ana’s frantic return queries. But whether Ysa somehow survived the dunes or she came back from Paradox a zombie or this is her ghost come a-haunting, Ana cannot get up to the sixteenth floor fast enough. Someone else is here! She’s not alone.
The elevator pings and the doors ease open.
Ana dashes down the hall to the main doors, emblazoned with the Savitech logo. She puts both hands on the door, leans against it for a second, pushing her forehead against the cool glass in a way that her body seems to remember.
For just an instant she’s a younger version of herself; it’s only a year or so ago, but this girl might as well be someone else entirely. This Ana bends under the weight of some invisible burden; she walks by the side of a slender light-
haired boy—it’s Todd—and, caught in the memory, she doesn’t even have to turn her head to see the longing in his eyes when he looks at her. But this younger Ana is oblivious to it, lost in a maelstro
m of internal chaos that no one else can see.
Ana lifts her head and pushes through the door, letting the memories—and her past—fall away behind her.
The room is still empty. On the television screen, one of the lights in the news studio has fallen over. It lies halfway across the newscaster’s desk, glass fragments strewn everywhere. Tiny blue flames lick across the papers that are scattered on the floor.
Ana tears her eyes away from the screen. “Ysa!” she calls. “Are you here?”
There’s nothing, a nothing so thick Ana wonders if maybe she imagined the whole thing. She takes a few steps forward, and then she hears a cough and a faint, “Ana?”
It’s coming from behind the door leading to the room where she woke up.
Ana passes the window showing the dark night sky, passes the worn pink couch, reaches her fingers up to the handle.
She takes a deep breath and pushes through.
The little cubicle is empty, exactly as it was when she left it.
“Ysa?” she whispers.
On the opposite side of the room, the hanging plastic strips are swaying ever so slightly.
“Ana …”
Ana pushes through the hanging strips and finds herself in a room identical to the one she woke up in. There’s another display, another tangle of machinery, another bed …
The world slips into syrupy slow motion as Ana wobbles toward the bed. That’s not Ysa lying there. It’s …
“Todd!” she gasps.
It’s not Todd as he was on Paradox, not exactly. There’s something different about his look—he seems somehow less than he did on the planet’s rugged slopes and under its bright berry skies. His pale hair is limp and obscured by the wide black headband with its connecting web of wires and electrodes, and he has the same loose arm restraints and hip belt as she found on herself when she woke up.
But it is Todd.
His eyes are closed. In one hand he clutches a shiny pink phone—Ysa’s phone, apparently.
“Hey,” she whispers.
Todd’s eyes flicker open, bright blue, so heart-wrenchingly familiar in this unfamiliar place. “You remember me,” he says. His voice is scratchy but holds a note of wonder, as if she’s handed him a gift he can’t quite bring himself to accept.
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