I spend a full ten minutes pacing the lab, walking off the emotion that’s left me shaking and a little dizzy. Too much pressure, too little sleep, and now this—I’m doing everything I possibly can, and I get yelled at in return? It’s not that I blame him for his frustration, or for demanding answers. I just wish I had answers togive.
I try to put it out of my mind for now. Do what I can. Dwelling on it will only lead toyour best is never enough, Lindley. To the reality that people are starting to break—that we have been breaking for weeks.
Eventually, I manage to pull it together. Focus does not come easily, to say the least.
For the better part of the next hour, I mull over the conundrum of my hazy lab results. One failed sample was disappointing, but three failed samples—failed in identical ways, for no obvious reason?
It’s suspicious. It isn’t right.
Where did I go wrong? I pace circles around my island, go back over the test procedures in my head. I didn’t miss anything. My measurements, my timers: all precise. The samples were fresh and handled properly, at least where Kerr and Jaako were concerned.
Sowhat happened?
All I can think to do now is run the labs on the saliva and hair samples. Saliva first, I decide—I’m much more familiar with that process than I am with hair’s. Zesi sealed two swabs each into small plastic bags. I prepare two vials of reagentsolution, and am just about to settle the swabs into position when I notice something odd.
They’re clean.
They’retooclean, for two people whose final breaths were laced with bloodbubbles. As if they never coughed blood up at all.
Holy—the implications here, everything this couldmean—
Suddenly I can’t move fast enough.
If there is no trace of blood in the saliva, that changes everything.
Everything.
33
SHADE AND SHADOW
THE WAY I see it, of the two possibilities at play here, one of them is impossible.
Either Zesi and Leo collected falsified samples—swabs taken from somewhere else,anywherebut from Jaako and Kerr—or these deaths were not due to a mutated virus at all.
If these strange saliva samples were the only odd things that had happened, that would be one thing, but they’re not. Three tests in a row have failed, 100 percent of the tests I’ve run on this new wave of death. None of my tests failed in the first wave, so I’m relatively certain it’s not simply that I’m doing it wrong. And then there’s the erratic way the virus seems to have spread: the victims had so little in common—Mila, who never spent time with Jaako and Kerr—while the six of us who’ve actually handled the dead remain untouched, living and breathing like always.
The only logical explanation is that the virus is not to blame.
I trust Zesi and Leo, would trust them with my life.
I trust them. They wouldn’t lie to me.
Right?
The alternative is equally unnerving:
Someoneon this station is lying. Someone on this station is a murderer.
34
ZOMBIE STARS
WHEN I WAS younger, maybe eight or nine, I liked to spend time in the sky lounge, sipping hot chocolate and staring out into the infinite star-spotted expanse. Leo would come and find me every now and then, sit beside me on the floor and talk my ear off for hours. He was very into space facts at the time, particularly the more terrifying ones.
I can still remember, vividly, the day I learned of zombie stars.
Of white dwarfs that have died, essentially, but end up coming back to life by creating an immense supernova that feeds off their neighboring stars.
