“What do we have on the menu?” I’m thumbing through a catalog of everything stored in the deep freeze and refrigeration units on the lower levels.
“Not much, to be honest.” He hunts and pecks on the keyboard with one hand. “Mostly virus stock.”
Watching him, it really hits me how much he’s lost. “You haven’t complained once.” I think it out loud.
“What?” he asks.
“Sorry. I was just saying you’re pretty damn tough.” I shrug. “That’s all.”
He waggles his severed forearm. “Oh, I belly-ached plenty the first few days after.” He stares at the wrapped end.“Especially when they stopped giving me the good meds. Bummer. The weirdest thing is the phantom of it. Still feel it there even though it’s gone. It even itches, like a very specific spot on the back of my wrist driving me crazy with an itch, but there’s nothing there to scratch.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Yeah, me too. It is what it is. I can still spin a record. They salvaged a few from the wreckage, if you can believe it. Most of them are history, but I still have some tunes. And there’s still a world out there. It’ll still be there when this war is over, when the plague is history, and I’ll be stockpiling fresh beats all over again. Gotta keep moving, you know?”
“I do.” I nod and go back to my catalog. “I think we all do.”
“Check it. Here it is.” He leans forward and taps on his screen. “Partial manifest of what they salvaged from the CDC before it got rocked. We got SierraVirus aplenty, common cold strains, flu strains for what looks like the past decade, and a smattering of about a hundred or so other things. All of it in the cold storage a few levels down. Not much in the way of fungus or bacteria.”
“Tougher to keep stable,” Evie murmurs from her desk.
“Yeah. So let’s start small. Safer that way. Something that’s not airborne.” I think through the options. “Keep it small but blunt. Only a few samples at a time, and introduce the virus directly into the blood and see what happens. The less fancy it is, the better off we’ll be during this trial phase. We’ll finetune it as we go.”
“Roger that.” He salutes. “I’ll head down and get what we need. Evie, need anything?”
She twirls on her stool. “No, I’m good for now.”
The door opens, a woman walking in, then pausing as she looks around at the three of us. “I should’ve knocked, I guess? Sorry about that.”
“Hey.” Evie looks up. “Astrid.”
“Hi.” She smiles, her dark eyes sparkling a little behind her wire-rimmed glasses. Dressed in casual but stylish civilian clothes, she pulls up a stool close to Evie and plops a large notebook on the desk. “Just figured I’d come check in since you have your new addition to the team. Brought some notes.”
I glance between them, then at Wyatt. He waggles his eyebrows and shoots the two of them a look. I snort a laugh.
“Oh, sorry.” Evie stands quickly. “This is Georgia. Georgia, meet Astrid. She heads the crew that’s been researching the vampires.”
“Heading downtown.” Wyatt opens the door, the guard outside giving him a sour look. “Evie’s good. You need anything, Georgia?”
“Yeah, some signalosomes, but I’m still looking for the right ones. This catalog system is prehistoric.” I flip another page. “Someone without any sort of basis in science must’ve compiled it. Makes no sense. A toddler could’ve done it better.” I glare at the notations written in neat block print at the bottom of the page. “At least they had nice handwriting, I guess.”
Evie clears her throat.
I look up. “What?”
She bobs her head toward Astrid in a comically obvious gesture.
“Okay then, I’m out.” Wyatt lets the door close, and he chuckles in the hallway.
“Sorry about that.” Astrid looks stricken.
Shit. “Oh, you?—”
“I did the best I could. The way those were categorized didn’t make sense to me, and I just did what I thought was best. The troops arrived with a mountain of things from the CDC and told me to make sense of them and to do it on paper because there was no guarantee our systems would keep working, and that wasbefore I’d even met Evie, so I organized sort of according to the numbers that were at the end of each sort of batch of vials or by the case.” She’s talking so fast her words start to blur. “I?—”
“I didn’t know. I’m sorry.” My cheeks heat. “It’s all right.”
“No, I’m sorry. I didn’t—I didn’t do it right.”
