I burrow into him, rest my cheek on his chest. He leans his head against mine, warm and comforting. “You’re sure you want to do this? I’m sorry, Linds, I know you said—”
Before he can finish, I sit up again—lean in—cut his words off with a kiss. He is all softness, all kindness, gentle and easy and careful; I press a little harder, kiss a little deeper, showing himyes, I’m surewithout so many words. It’s new and familiar all at once, not as far a leap as I first thought from friendship to... this. Not as strange, not as awkward. Not strange or awkward at all.
We lose a long stretch of time, linger in this brand-new thingthat is just between us. For once, I’m not counting the minutes.
Until there is a knock at my door, and we break away, his face as flushed as mine feels. I jump up to answer it, smooth my hair and straighten my shirt.
I open it and find Leo on the other side.
“Am... I... interrupting?” he says, eyeing Heath, eyeing me.
Is it really that obvious?
“Sorry I missed your calls, man,” Leo says mercifully, not forcing us to answer his own question. He turns back to me, and, oh—something isn’t right. Something is very, very wrong. “We’ve... got a situation.”
We’ve got a situation.
The words paralyze me, make me feel sick.
Leo has no way of knowing how eerily similar his words are to the ones Dr. Safran spoke, back when the virus claimed its first handful of victims. And yet I have this feeling, I justknoweven before he says it, it’s happening again.
“Who?” I ask. “How many?”
Heath is at my side now. Both of us look to Leo for answers. I don’t know about Heath, but I’m hoping, hard, that Leo will tell me what I want to hear, not what I fear.
“Two dead,” he says. “Jaako Solano and Kerr Barstow.”
Kerr was one of the most beautiful girls on the station, and also one of the brightest. She and Jaako were like movie stars from back on Earth—how I imagined movie stars to be,anyway: everyone watching their every move, secretly wanting to befriend them, tobethem. They were untouchable, especially after they finally started dating a few months ago.
They were untouchable.
“We won’t be able to keep this quiet for long,” Heath says, and it’s like he’s plucked the thought directly from my head.
“We won’t be able to keep it quiet at all.” Leo grimaces. “Zesi and I weren’t the first to find them.”
26
ROCK TO A STORM TO AN OCEAN
“NO, NO, NO—THIS isnotgood.” I pace the room, borderline panicked. “I should have spent more time in the lab, I should have—”
“You’ve had a lot on your plate,” Leo says. “You’ve done all you could.”
Leo is the rock to my storm, steady and unmoved. Heath is somewhere in between: Heath is the ocean, steady and wild all at once.
And I waskissing Heathwhile Jaako and Kerr lay dead. While someone discovered them.
“I could have done more,” I say. “I should have run more tests—why didn’t I run more tests?” More death should not come as a surprise, given Mila, given what happened to our parents. And yet. Perhaps I’ve been deluding myself, holding tight to a small bit of hope—that Mila was a fluke. That there was no mutation. That if I could just make sure we’re well-fed, make sure we’re not the target of some asteroid’s collision course,make sure we’re not positioning ourselves to be overtaken by a ruthless slave driver, I could keep us alive.
My best is not enough. My best is not enough, and now I can’t even call Shapiro for help.
“Linds.Lindley.” Leo is face-to-face with me now, his hands on my shoulders. “You could not have stopped this no matter how many tests you ran.”
Look at what happened to our parents, he doesn’t have to say. “So, what, I’m not even supposed to try? This is obviously a mutation—just because we weren’t able to stop the virus the first time around, maybe there’s a way to stop this one. Maybe three deaths will be the end of it.”
Three deaths are already three too many.
And three deaths confirms it: Mila was no fluke. It’s already begun to spread.
