The days leading up to it were excruciating: Alexandra, watching the others die off, one by one. Watching as I lost my mother, as Heath and Haven lost their parents. As Alexandra herself lost herhusband.
Knowing with certainty that she’d be next. If not next, then soon.
Leo was remarkably strong in her final days. He felt he had to be, I think. Seeing Leo devastated would have been worse for her than the dying itself, and if there was one thing left in his power, it was to keep it from being worse.
He practiced so long at tucking himself in—all the wayward anxiety and fear and sorrow—that he’s kept at it ever since. Only once have I seen him unravel, and that didn’t happen until they were all dead, every single one of them. When it hit him—hitus—that we were really, truly, irreversibly without them. Alone.
We sat on the floor near my window, just the two of us, insilence, all night long. Neither of us slept. I was in too much shock to cry, in too much denial. He was shaking, hard, even with the blaze turned on full force, even when I slipped my mother’s favorite blanket off my shoulders and wrapped it around his.
We counted stars.
We laid out the deck of cards, piled it back up again.
We didn’t talk. We didn’t need to.
He might walk around like he’s fine now, might even seem like he’s doingwellto anyone who doesn’t know him like I do. I know better, though. I knowhimbetter.
And I know, because I do the very same thing.
40
EXCEPTIONS
IT’S FORTY-TWO PAST the thirty-six-hour mark, and I haven’t heard another word from Leo. I’ve spent the entire time with my fingers hovering over the buzz screen, trying to decide what—how—whether—to tell him about his mother’s blood.
On one hand, there’s not a soul I trust more. There’s not anyone I know better than Leo, and I am one thousand percent certain he would never even think to murder someone, let alone actually do it. And the crime itself is worse than just a single straightforward murder—it must have taken extreme planning and calculation to stage these deaths to look like a viral mutation. I don’tthinkLeo is our liar. The one thing holding me back from telling him everything, though, is that these deaths required extreme resources.
Codes, first and foremost. The samples scraped from all the others who died—Alexandra’s blood included—are stored in a single location: the mini-fridge two feet behind me. In order to access it, the killer would have needed all-access codes to this lab, an awareness of my time spent here, and the knowledgethat we kept all those blood samples in the first place. There are only a few people who haveallof those things: six, to be exact. Five, if we’re not counting me.
Leo wouldn’t have done something so coldhearted, though. And if he had, surely he wouldn’t have used his own mother’s blood.
Right?
Except that’s exactly the sort of calculated forethought the killer must possess, if they’re hiding right here in plain sight—to think of the person most likely to discover the deaths as murders, if they’re discovered at all. To orchestrate the details in such a way that would rule them out as suspects.
I can’t make any assumptions. I have to work based onfacts.
And the fact is, Leo and Zesi collected these samples from Jaako and Kerr in the first place. Leo was the one who called me in the middle of the night when Mila died, too. And he is the one who put Mila’s blood sample in the wrong refrigerator after we found her—could that have been on purpose, to make it unusable? Could he have planned things out to that extent, that even then he was setting himself up to have no apparent knowledge about which mini-fridge we used for sample storage?
My head is spinning; my world has inverted.
I thought I was alone before, but now,nowI am truly alone. Because, really, what it comes down to is that someone is very much not who I thought they were. I can’t even trust my own judgment—is there anything more isolating than that?
But then I come back around to the truth, that I usuallyhave very good judgment, that I have sharp instincts. And that I shouldn’t rule out the rest of the station just because I can’t understand how they would have had access to the codes, to my schedule, to the inner workings of how and where we stored the blood samples, or that we stored blood samples at all. It seems just as plausible that someone could have figured outallof those things—more plausible, possibly!—than if Leo had suddenly turned into someone I don’t actually know. The same holds true for Heath, for Zesi, for Haven, for Natalin, differences of opinion aside.
So I sit here, finger hovering over my blank buzz screen.
I don’t want to live in a world where I can’t trust Leo. In that world, I can’t trust anything, not even myself—and how is that going to help? It’s going to take more than just me to figure out what exactly killed our three; I’ll definitely need to run more tests in the lab, but it’s more complicated than just that.
If I trust Leo and I’m wrong, that would be devastating. If he’s kept this much from me, he’s not the person I know, not even a little bit—and what would keep him from killing me? To what lengths would our murderer go to keep their secret? I could end up just another body, sprinkled with the blood of Alexandra Tovar.She spent all that time in the lab, Haven would say, in the obligatory station-wide announcement.Of course she was more susceptible to the mutation.
If Idon’ttrust Leo, though—if I fumble around in secret for answers instead of asking for help where I need it—someoneelse might die in the time it takes for me to make all the necessary connections.
I pick up the buzz screen, type in a message.Question: Do you know how to access the security vid-feeds?
As soon as I hit send, I realize: I’m hoping for anoas much as I am ayes. No more than two seconds later, my screen lights up with a new message.
Yeah, Leo writes.Need something?
